Or is it just the obvious , Russian gas, rising Energy costs, now their prices are too high, so exports are down.
Japan has had relatively bad aging, per capita growth for working-age population since 1990 is equal to the US.
Indeed, the issue of demographics has been a massive problem because politicians repeat the mantra: population cannot age, we must mass import. Okay...but most high productivity people aren't going to Germany (and to be clear, this has been the case in France, the UK, many other places). So they just get more minimum-wage workers who drag down productivity/incomes.
I agree with your point about the parties but Japan is a very backwards-looking society, they have had none of these issues. Their economic policy hasn't been perfect but if you compare to Western Europe: they haven't made a lot of those errors either so naturally ended up in a better place.
With Germany, there is an issue with pension sustainability without population growth...but the problem is: pension sustainability not a lack of population growth (even if it wasn't, as I explain above, it is quite literally impossible today to solve this issue with immigration...the productive people aren't leaving the US, it isn't happening).
You have seen Western Europe go even harder on population growth and (if anything) economic growth has just accelerated lower.
Economic growth is quite simple: make things that people want, train people to make those things, do it all very cheaply (look at Eastern Europe, higher standard of living, lower incomes so lower wages and more business investment, sensible investment in government services...these economies weren't even on the map when Germany was going through the 2000s slump).
Asking for citations does not mean that the things you cite are relevant or useful.
GDP per capita growth since 1990 is equal to the US. Yes, this is good. Work hours are longer...than what? They are shorter than the US and most of Europe by OECD data...where are your citations? Debt is higher...than what? Personal rates of debt are lower, and they have a huge net foreign asset position...did you cite something without understanding what it meant? Birth rates are lower...yes, why is this bad? It hasn't impacted GDP per capita...so why is it bad? Again, is this something you are "citing" without understanding?
Not it’s not. That’s just an absurd claim. Japan had even GDP per capita with the US in 1990, briefly overtook it ~1995.
Now US has more than twice as high GDP per capita (76k vs 34k). The Japanese economy has been stagnant since the mid 90s…
In PPP it’s almost as bad (45k vs 76k).
Now look at Japan and Germany, they were about even until 2007 now Germany is massively ahead.
> citing" without understanding?
Coming from someone who didn’t even bother looking up how Japan’s GDP per capita changed (or rather stayed stagnant) over the last 20+ years?
Anecdotal!
This was about a decade ago, suddenly ran into a guy I knew from highschool who studied CS in another city. Told me he dropped out during his master's because he failed math, then got hired by a medium-sized company making sensors and actuators, who now wanted to enter the smart home business. Remote controllable relays for power outlets basically, energy meters, door-open sensors, not much more at that point. He was basically the only dev for the first six months, then got promoted to team lead and had two other devs working for him.
He was inexperienced and had quite the ego when I talked to him back then. He was smug about using Arch Linux while I was on debian. He then went on and excitedly told me "did you know!? you can't just use ssh to get a shell on another computer, but tunnel arbitrary data over it!" I guess you don't learn much just copying commands from the Arch Linux wiki all day. Anyways, when I told him I don't think this project will go anywhere and will pretty much be done once Google or any other big player decides to enter that space, he just brushed it off because "they will have been there first". Needless to say, he's not with that company any more, but not after suffering some burnout... Two years after college!
But software and technology is especially poorly compensated there.
> the country operates in a two-caste system
I don't know for today but I remember in the 1980' some German engineers playing games on their computers during work at Deutsch Telecom.
A country can only take so much incapability and corruption, before things go downhill.
As a German I warn, we better watch Germany very closely, if the likes of AfD get to power. Way too many people are either desperate enough or uninformed enough or disappointed enough to vote for the far right bordering illegal.
This has all been in the making for a long time, due to previous and current governments. A party like FDP is very far removed from its originally held values, and would love to jump in bed with the far right AfD, if that brought them into the government again after the Ampel coalition. They are traitors of democracy basically, just like CDU.
Btw I love DW news, such a great channel.
The current target seems to be the "Junge Alternative", the AfD's youth organization. Since that's just an association and not a party, it's an easier target. Also, the party youth organizations tend to be more radical than their "grown-up" counterparts, so it's probably relatively simple to make a case there.
A particularly annoying one is the debt break (Schuldenbremse) Germany introduced a few years ago. It prevents many investments currently. This one could be fixed relatively quickly though.
In the sense that you could just repeal it, but not in the sense that there is a majority for that. The opposition parties are against repealing it, because it damages the current government, and roughly half or more of the government coalition are also against repealing it, because they consider austerity sound economic theory (meanwhile the other half considers rapidly ballooning welfare and transfer payments a feature, not a bug, and also believes rent control works, so arguably there just aren't very many adults in the room setting German economic policy right now).
So it's something that cannot be fixed quickly because people are actively against fixing it.
People don't seem to understand that Germany's export strategy is fueled by debt. It looks fine from the perspective of Germany alone, but this strategy has resulted in an overall increase in debt in the entire euro area and Germans are hypocritical enough to think that they are the heroes saving the EU when the situation is the exact opposite. Euro area debt is bailing out the German export economy.
For example: German car makers are still somewhat reluctant to embrace electric motors (no matter the power source or storage) and would like to stay with combustion engines (no matter the combustible) because that's a niche they and the entire downstream industry feel comfortable with.
Yes, a large share of the industrial base in Germany hinges on it. But a long-term view on things would have started divesting from this exclusivity decades ago. Instead, they hoped the challenge just goes away by building better combustion engines. There's _finally_ some movement in that direction (Volkswagen embracing EVs is huge), but there are also still reactionary pockets that try to water everything down because hydrogen or synthetic fuels are right around the corner, just you wait! (possible, but very unlikely)
Another example from the industry: The chemical industry never hedged their reliance on fossils, either. While they will remain a consumer of fossils for chemical processes, the industry was comfortable just heating whatever they need to be really hot with them as well. Now they're scrambling to retool their factories to still use fossils where impossible to replace (e.g. fertilizer production uses the chemical properties) but to use hydrogen when stuff just needs to get hot. That the amount of fossil fuel might go down was _kinda_ obvious with all those CO2-reduction targets, but they preferred to wait it out.
I see more hope with them, though: they need to retool, but after the furnaces use hydrogen (wherever that comes from), they can do business as usual (and gradually optimize hydrogen sourcing). The car industry (some say that 20% of the German industrial base rely on that directly or indirectly) is much worse off.
Another example, this time politics: Deutsche Bahn (DB) is a private company fully owned by the government. There's some money going back and forth between the company and its owner, but one of the arrangements was that DB pays for maintenance of its infrastructure itself, but catastrophic loss of infrastructure (and related repairs/rebuilds) are covered through government money. What is the private company (that was expected to pay some 8-9 digit sums of earnings back to the federal budget for years as part of that back-and-forth) doing then? Cut down on maintenance. When stuff breaks entirely, repairs aren't on them, so that's the "rational" choice for the company. Politicians were asleep at the wheel as far as these incentives are concerned (or worse: they calculated with them, kicking the can down the road.)
There are advocates for moving more logistics from the road to rail, but that's kinda stuck because there's a huge repair-and-investment plan right now (to deal with that oversight of decades) that will block various key routes for the next few years.
And it's not as if the Autobahn-network is any better off (map with construction sites at https://www.autobahn.de/die-autobahn): lots of bridges from the 60s reaching their end-of-life all at once because maintenance is an expense that was better ignored (since politicians decided that above all else, the country mustn't increase its debt: So we had a kinda-balanced budget but accrued the steel-and-concrete equivalent of tech debt)
The article talks about layoffs.
But if they are having layoffs, and people can't find work, that would indicate they do have workers, not a shortage of workers.
The current trends are unsustainable, sure, but just unsustainable for our current economic regime.
So that cannot be it.