The Societal Costs of Economic Decline

经济衰退的社会成本

• 批准号: 464443905
• 负责人: Dr. Andreas Lichter
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Düsseldorfer Institut für Wettbewerbsökonomie
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2020-12-31 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/464443905?language=en
• 关键词: Societal; Costs; Economic; Decline

In this project, we will analyze whether the notable rise of populism in East Germany can be linked to the economic turmoil that hit the country in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Various contemporary accounts have argued that this unexpected and long-lasting economic downturn caused sentiments of negligence, frustration, and economic insecurity among East German citizens that ultimately served as fertile ground for today’s populist rhetoric. We will put these claims to a rigorous empirical test by drawing upon fine-grained regional data from both before and after reunification as well as state-of-the-art identification strategies. To this end, we will first combine and harmonize various administrative data sources on local employment and economic activity from both the times of the German Democratic Republic and post-reunification Germany. We will then draw upon this dataset to investigate (determinants of) regional differences in the economic downturn that followed Germany’s reunification. We hypothesize that the extent of the ``economic shock of reunification’’ differed substantially across East German regions because of their differential industrial composition during the times of the socialist regime, and the fact that some Eastern industries almost met the West German productivity standard while others were remarkably unproductive. To test this hypothesis, we will draw upon existing industry-level measures of the East-West productivity gap for the late 1980s and calculate for each East German municipality its implied productivity gap to the West, subject to its pre-reunification composition of industrial employment. We will then relate this measure of local productivity to municipalities’ evolution of employment post reunification. In the final part of the proposed project, we will eventually link the extent of the local economic shock of reunification in the early 1990s to local voting behavior in the 2010s. However, simple correlations of this relationship are most likely biased – e.g., due to persistent regional differences in political preferences, concurrent time-varying policy differences, or endogenous economic development post reunification. To establish causal effects, we will therefore implement an instrumental variables strategy that will allow us to isolate the exogenous component in the observed local post-reunification employment shocks that is merely due to local productivity differentials prior to reunification.

在这个项目中，我们将分析东德民粹主义的显著崛起是否与柏林墙倒塌后袭击该国的经济动荡有关。当代的各种说法都认为，这种意想不到的、持久的经济衰退导致了东德公民的忽视、沮丧和经济不安全感，最终成为了今天民粹主义言论的沃土。我们将利用统一前后的细粒度区域数据以及最先进的识别策略，对这些主张进行严格的实证检验。为此目的，我们将首先合并和协调德意志民主共和国时期和统一后德国关于当地就业和经济活动的各种行政数据来源。然后，我们将利用这些数据集来调查德国统一后经济衰退的地区差异（决定因素）。我们假设，“统一后的经济冲击”在东德地区的程度存在很大差异，因为在社会主义政权时期，它们的工业构成存在差异，而且一些东德工业几乎达到了西德的生产率标准，而另一些工业的生产率却非常低。为了验证这一假设，我们将利用现有的20世纪80年代末东西方生产率差距的工业水平测量方法，并根据其统一前的工业就业构成，计算每个东德城市与西方的隐含生产率差距。然后，我们将把当地生产力的这一措施与统一后城市就业的演变联系起来。在拟议项目的最后一部分，我们将最终将20世纪90年代初统一的地方经济冲击程度与21世纪10年代的地方投票行为联系起来。然而，这种关系的简单相关性很可能是有偏差的——例如，由于政治偏好的持续区域差异、同时存在的时变政策差异或统一后内生的经济发展。因此，为了确定因果关系，我们将实施工具变量策略，使我们能够在观察到的统一后当地就业冲击中分离出外生因素，这些冲击仅仅是由于统一前当地生产率差异造成的。