German Producer Groups and Export-Led Growth: Macroeconomic Strategy or Emergent Policy Regime?

IMPRS Colloquium

  • Date: Nov 8, 2021
  • Time: 03:00 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Speaker: Mischa Stratenwerth
  • Doctoral researcher, IMPRS-SPCE
German Producer Groups and Export-Led Growth: Macroeconomic Strategy or Emergent Policy Regime?
National economic growth models are shaped by underlying policy regimes. To learn more about the domestic political dynamics of growth regimes, my dissertation project centers on investigating the positions and activities of organized capital and organized labor in different sectors of the economy regarding the macroeconomic policy foundations of the German export-led growth model.

In the upcoming colloquium, I intend to focus on the notion that Germany’s export-oriented policy constellation is the result of a deliberate growth strategy promoted by key sector producer groups and the coalitions forming around them. Drawing on expert interviews and available accounts of producer groups’ macroeconomic policy attitudes, I suggest that the German undervaluation regime should be viewed as an emergent outcome rather than as a cohesive design of mercantilist masterminds. Aggregate results may match theoretical expectations but producer groups oftentimes do not ground their positions in the same economic framework that the growth model perspective establishes; their preferences are informed by other considerations and based on alternative understandings of economic mechanisms. This causes problems for approaches based solely on assumed economic interests and suggests that the developing literature on the politics of growth models needs to give careful attention to actors’ underlying reasoning. In the German case, this might help to explain why producer group politics in the field of macroeconomic policy is not marked by much conflict even though sectoral economic interests may be anticipated to diverge considerably.

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