ifo Media Center
The ifo Institute invites you to participate in the discussion of interesting economic topics via the Internet. In our ifo Media Center a whole series of remarkable events are available and can be viewed in full length. We also record selected speeches and presentations given by employees or at events and make them available in our Media Center.
ifo Business Survey Construction (2018b)
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ifo Business Survey Industry (2018b)
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ifo Business Survey Service (2018b)
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ifo Investment Database (2018)
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ifo Viewpoint No. 200: The Third Type of Inter-System Competition: Europe and the Rise of China
In the debate over the economic and political future of Europe a widely debate challenge is that the global balance of power is shifting towards Asia, and especially towards China.
ifo Viewpoint No. 199: Tragedies Like Greece Must Not Be Repeated
This August the third bail-out programme for Greece came to an end, but this does not mean that the crisis is over. The country will feel its after-effects for a long time to come and it remains hard to say whether investors will ever get their money back. But the Eurozone can stop crises like Greece from happening again elsewhere by implementing reforms that strike a balance between greater fiscal discipline and more solidarity.
ifo World Economic Survey (2018q3)
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ifo Viewpoint No. 198: Tariffs on cars
The escalation of the conflict between the USA and its trade partners seems inexorable. In May 2018 Donald Trump commissioned the US Department of Commerce to investigate whether car imports constitute a threat to US national security. The US Department of Commerce points out that the share of cars imported into the US market has risen from 32 percent to 48 percent over the last 20 years. Between 1990 and 2017 the number of jobs in the US automotive industry fell by 22 percent. US firms accounted for only 20 percent of global research and development expenditure in the automotive sector, and for just 7 percent of car part production. It therefore seems very likely that the US government will argue that car imports pose a threat to national security. That is, of course, no more than an excuse to impose tariffs.
ifo Business Survey Service (2018a)
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ifo Business Survey Trade (2018a)
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ifo Business Survey Construction (2018a)
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ifo Business Survey Industry (2018a)
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ifo Viewpoint No. 197: Trade Disputes: Why Trump’s Position Is Much Weaker against EU than China
US President Donald Trump insists that his country is being treated unfairly by both the EU and China in terms of commercial trade. By this he means that European and Chinese companies and their employees live on exports to the USA, while Americans benefit far less from market access to Europe and China. This is why Trump is threatening to start a trade war. He sees himself as in the stronger negotiating position – he thinks that isolation would damage China and Europe more than it would the USA. This reasoning is not only flawed because imports of foreign products are extremely useful to the demand-side, which includes both consumers and companies.
ifo Viewpoint No. 196: Italy’s New Government: Transfer Union or Euro Exit
The Five Star Movement and the Lega Nord promised Italian voters massive tax cuts and increases in public spending in their election campaigns. How a country with a government debt ratio of 132 percent of its economic output was going to finance these promises was unclear though. Now the first draft of a coalition agreement between the two parties has been made public, explaining where the money is supposed to come from: namely from the purses of taxpayers in other Eurozone countries. If these countries don’t go along with the plan, the coalitionists wish to take Italy out of the Eurozone.
ifo World Economic Survey (2018q2)
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ifo Viewpoint No. 195: Germany Should Adopt an Area-Based Property Tax
Germany’s Constitutional Court has declared the current property tax as unconstitutional because it is based on property values that are decades old, ultimately resulting in an arbitrary distribution of the tax burden among taxpayers. The Court explained that a property tax does not necessarily need to be based on real estate values. If, however, the tax is based on the value of plots and houses, sufficiently up-to-date values need to be used, and changes over time need to be taken into account.
ifo Viewpoint No. 194: Why We Need to React to Trump
US President Donald Trump began 2018 with a tax policy bang: he announced massive tax cuts in the US, with tax rates on corporate profits falling from 35 percent to 21 percent. With this reform Trump wants to encourage companies to invest more in the USA and to post a greater share of their global profits there.
ifo Viewpoint No. 193: Is the Grand Coalition Leading Germany towards a Transfer Union? The Euro Junktim
The CSU/CDU and the SPD are currently coming under fire for seeking to turn the Eurozone into a transfer union. Firstly, criticism is directed at their plan to enshrine the ESM euro bail out mechanism in EU law. This raises the question of whether the German veto on bail-out credit for countries with financial difficulties will be weakened. Secondly, the coalition wants to create a new fund conceived as the starting point for a future investment budget in the Eurozone. Although the coalition partners also say that the principle of linking control to liability in the Eurozone will continue to apply in the future, this is cold comfort. This principle has already been greatly weakened: not only through the bail-out credits granted to Greece that probably will never be repaid, but primarily through the TARGET balances in the ECB System. Via TARGET, Germany has granted other Eurozone countries interest-free credit worth over 900 billion euros for an undefined period of time. And this figure is rising. Germany urgently needs to scrutinise any uncontrolled increase in liability for other states. The grand coalition is doing just the opposite. It is moving in the direction of greater redistribution and joint liability. In line with these developments, Germany’s acting Finance Minister Peter Altmaier has signalled in Brussels that Germany would agree to a Eurozone deposit insurance scheme. He has warned that the volume of bad loans in the banking system needs to be reduced but this is not enough.
ifo World Economic Survey (2018q1)
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EBDC Business Investment Panel (2017)
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