Nevertheless, one advantage: the IMF is worried about Germany

The IMF sees Germany in a multiple crisis right away – and names the usual construction sites: energy, infrastructure, skilled workers and digitization. Experts urge public investment. The IMF sees an advantage that Germany still has.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) sees considerable problems in Germany as a business location. Whether energy, infrastructure, skilled workers or digitization: Everywhere the “Federal Republic has fallen behind”, quoted the “Spiegel” the director of the European department of the IMF, Alfred Kammer. That costs productivity and growth.

Germany has “undoubtedly major, current problems,” Kammer said. The country is particularly badly affected by changing globalization. What is now necessary is a “large state investment program”.

The IMF Europe Director named broadband expansion, digital administration and more energy sovereignty as possible focal points. But more public funds for functioning express train connections, motorways and ports would also make sense, as would an education program to enable people to switch from one job to another more quickly and flexibly.

In addition, “of course, more efforts to protect the climate are necessary,” emphasized Kammer. The current crisis must be “the wake-up call for a new, green economy in Germany”. The federal government should make every effort to achieve this. The advantage of Germany is that the public budgets are “financially still in better shape” than in many other places.

The head of the DIW economic institute, Marcel Fratzscher, also pushed for massive investments in the future. “A structural change is needed in almost all areas,” he also told the “Spiegel”. Massive additional investments are needed “now, and not in two or five years”.

The economist Oliver Holtemöller from the Leibniz Institute for Economic Research in Halle (IWH) referred above all to major deficits in digitization. Here Germany is “only in the middle internationally”. As an example, Holtemöller mentioned that the IMF was still receiving faxes from federal ministries.