German Reunification has failed economically: Ifo

[kskiska]

LEIPZIG, Germany (AFP) - German reunification in 1990 has been a failure from an economic point of view, the head of leading economic research institute Ifo said in a television interview.

Since the wall came down in 1990, economic developments in the former communist east have been "worse and more catastrophic than even the biggest pessimists had predicted," Hans-Werner Sinn told the regional eastern German television station MDR.

The Ifo president said that wages in eastern Germany should be lowered so that the region can remain competitive with eastern European countries.

"In the medium term, wages in eastern Germany should fall to a level somewhere between the level of wages in Poland and in western Germany," he said late Monday.

Despite massive transfers of cash from west to east Germany over the past 13 years, the economic gap between the two parts of Germany has not narrowed and unemployment in the east is still more than double that in the west, Sinn said.

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[Fovea]

1. ignore your infrastructure

and it will go away. Putting a society back together from
collapse is agonizingly difficult, Dubya could have taken a lesson from Germany's difficulties regarding Iraq, which is even more chaotic than the old GDR was.

[Mairead]

2. And this is a news flash?? Capitalism *depends* on the majority suffering

so that the few can be wealthy. It's simply not reasonable to expect to integrate a ton of people into an economy that's just about holding its own with the existing people. And as long as they keep trying to allow more disparity, the worse it's going to get!

People who really believe that increasing the concentration of wealth will improve the lives of the many should be treated for psychiatric disorder! And those that don't believe it but want to do it anyway should be treated as criminals!