Structural Policy and Subsidies in the Federal Republic of Germany. Debates and Decisions after the 'Economic Miracle'

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The proposed project will analyze debates and decisions on subsidies as a tool of the political management of structural change in the Federal Republic. It concentrates on the period between the early 1960s and the late 1980s when macroeconomic growth problems and industrial adjustment crises made structural policy a major political area with numerous players - federal and state governments, the European Community, business companies and trade unions, science and media - which has attracted only marginal attention of historians. Understanding subsidies as an expression of the political perception of basic economic problems and as an outcome of processes of negotiation, it seeks to bridge the gap between economic and general contemporary history. The project focuses on subsidies in a narrow sense, i.e. tax deductions for or payments to individual companies or entire industries, and locates them in the context of sectoral and regional structural policy. On the basis of published and unpublished data it will, firstly, trace the quantitative development of subsidies, differentiated by sponsored regions and sectors, and relate it to the basic trends of structural change in the West German economy. Secondly, the political and scientific, internal and public debates about subsidies as an instrument of structural policy are to be reconstructed; here, the project seeks to exemplify continuity and change of levels of expectation in economic policy over the course of varying governing coalitions and overall economic concepts. Thirdly, and based upon archival sources, specific negotiation and decision-making processes of subsidy policy will be examined. Here, the project pays special attention to the influences of changing perceptions of structural change and learning effects of structural policy, the role of scientific expertise and public opinion, and the enforcement of interests, thus observing shifts of bargaining power between industries, federal and state governments. As examples of the adjustment problems of 'old' industries on the one hand and the promotion of particularly 'modern' sectors on the other, the steel and aircraft industries will be examined more closely.