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2014
Book Article
Titel
What has been maintaining Germany's competitiveness in manufacturing?
Abstract
The German economy has been outperforming other member countries of the European Union during the recent Great Recession and the still ongoing European debt crisis and in spite of the strong incentives for outsourcing or offshoring manufacturing activity existing in the world economy. What are the determinants of this surprising outcome? This chapter sets out to empirically analyze the trade and technology specialization and the price or cost performance of the German economy over the past decades. Drawing on standard indicators of trade and technological specialization (Revealed Comparative Advantage, Relative Export Advantage, Revealed Patent Advantage, Revealed Scientific Literature Index) and of the countrys price or cost position (real effective exchange rate, unit labor cost, labor productivity), complemented with data on R&D expenditures and personnel, we identify the leading product groups in which German industry is specialized. Furthermore, we apply the unit value approach to determine whether the competitiveness of German manufacturing products is related to price or quality advantage. Also, we estimate the degree of vertical specialization characterizing the German export sector in order to determine the role global value chains play in strengthening Germanys competitiveness in manufacturing. All indicators presented are calculated for the Peoples Republic of China, Germany, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States for the period 19902011. Our results confirm the work of other authors concerning the strong specialization of Germany in medium-range technology products. In contrast to most other studies we conclude that (i) quality is the main driver of German international competitiveness in selected product groups, (ii) the evolution of price and cost indicators determines competitiveness in other product groups and (iii) R&D efforts have contributed to develop and maintain German competitiveness in knowledge-intensive manufactured products. Finally, the chapter briefly discusses issues in public policy, particularly R&D activity and human capital accumulation, in the light of the empirical findings and taking into account major future challenges to manufacturing faced by the world economy. Background / Purpose: Sharing primary data is a key component for scientifically informed decision making in integrated biodiversity research. We present a web portal for data management that can share data and metadata, given data owner granted access rights. Main conclusion: Using web applications such as BEFdata presented here boosts scientific analysis by opening up data and naming conventions to the semantic web.Copyrights: Table 2 was reproduced with kind permission from Nadrowski et al (2012) presented at GeNeMe 2012: virtual enterprises, research communities and social media networks.