Volume 70, Issue 3

Germany is a rather water-rich country. Nevertheless, climatic changes might make it necessary to use water resources carefully in the future, especially in times of drought. Against this background, this paper estimates the price elasticity of household water consumption, differentiating between households that have a rough knowledge of water prices and households that do not. Based on about 1,100 observations for households living in single-family houses and using the sum of cubic meter prices for water and wastewater as price measure, we find a moderate but statistically significantly non-zero price elasticity of -0.102. Households that have knowledge of water prices tend to exhibit a higher elasticity, while households without price knowledge do not show a statistically significant response in their water consumption. Prices can thus only be used to a limited extent as a means of controlling water consumption.

In the process of occupational changes connected to digitisation, lifelong learning continues to gain in importance. Using microdata from the German microcensus for 2011 and 2016 the article finds that in North Rhine-Westphalia participation in adult education is significantly lower than in other Länder. Most importantly, it is less likely for workers in North Rhine-Westphalia to participate than for workers with a similar qualification and age in Southern and Northern Germany. Among the policy measures designed to meet the challenges of ongoing structural change, encouragement of participation in adult education is therefore a likely step.

Digitization is probably one of the greatest opportunities in recent years and, at the same time, one of the greatest challenges of our time. The aim of this article is to find possible answers to the question of which factors are considered as barriers to innovation for SMEs and which are suitable for promoting innovations in the field of digitization. For this purpose, a survey conducted by the IHK Region Stuttgart among its member companies in 2018 is evaluated. The barriers identified can be divided into four categories: 1. Innovation management in the company/lack of knowledge of the market, 2. Funding bottlenecks beyond research and development (R&D), 3. Labor market restrictions (education/training of skilled workers) and 4. Bureaucracy and legal regulations/regulation. Overall, as the analysis shows, there are both internal and external barriers to innovation. The companies cite regulatory and bureaucratic barriers as the most important obstacles to innovation. The regression analysis shows, among other things, that companies that state the regulatory framework as problematic have a greater likelihood of developing a strategy than others as well as employing a digitization officer.