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Comment by Derbasti | Hacker News Reader

I think the most fascinating point in this is that wages remained constant in Germany whereas they rose in the countries that are in the worst shape right now.

Can anyone corroborate this data? Is this actually true? That would be such an easy explanation…

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Part of it is playing catch-up with Germany but another part of it is that the Germans restructured their economy quite a bit to reach as close to full employment as they are. I'm having a hard time finding any sources to link to but they provide a lot of government incentives for hiring part-time workers and income top-ups for those workers. As their exports have experienced growth the income has been spread out as it increased. These other nations just enjoyed a huge influx of private credit to rev up their economies - no plan, no accounting for the long-term impact of the changes.

It's true, but it's debatable how much it explains. Germany looks relatively good right now, but it's been 20 years of slow growth and lots of pain after '89. It's funny that just a couple of years ago, say 2003, you'd read about the booming Greece and "sick man of Europe" Germany.

And Ireland was the Celtic Tiger...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_Tiger

Unfortunately, this is true - at least it gets regularily reported in german newspapers and I have no reason to believe that they are wrong. I write unfortunately because the translation is that germans today are far less wealthy than ten years ago and now we pull our neighbours down with us.

Some of the countries, like Spain and Italy, were to some degree trying to "catch up", weren't they? That is to say, Germans had a lot more purchasing power to start with.

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