I suggest that people don't go too overboard in praising Germany. Their unemployment rate over the past 20 years has been a disgrace and do not forget that though their trade surplus is healthy some consider it also reflects the weakness in German commodity consumption.
Germany's (previous) economic woes could be reflective of the pain of integrating E. Germany. But then again that illustrates the problem of comparing economies directly. For e.g. could the influx 'cheap' east German labor make the overall German economy more competitive.
Given that they absorbed the whole of East Germany only 20 years ago, it seems a little unfair to measure their unemployment rate over that period. Today they are doing pretty well - what an amazing achievement that is, given the circumstances.
Remember that in Germany, you are legally unemployed if you earn less than 400 Euros (500-600$) per month. If you are unemployed, you don't have to pay taxes.
This makes most employees of Starbucks, McDonalds etc. count as unemployed.
To the contrary, you do not count as unemployed towards the official statistics. You will get benefits in addition to your salary though. Essentially the same manipulations are done to the statistics here as in many countries, they try to remove most unemployed people from the numbers by sending them to training, minimum wage jobs (so called 1 euro jobs). This has gotten a lot worse in the past years and the social divide has become as large as in e.g. The US.
Actually, I am not sure about the statistics. Even though 400E-jobs are considered unemployed legally, they might still include them in the statistics to make them look better.
Hm, that seems kind of strange to me--while it might legally be considered unemployed, would these employees not have health-insurance paid by their employer and receive retirement compensation?
They do get health insurance. However, it is paid as part of the general German welfare system (hence, tax money) and not by the employer. As far as I know they get the same retirement compensation as if they were unemployed. (Not so sure, there)
Social security benefits however are a rather alien concept to Germans in general. Healthcare and retirement compensation are government regulated, so individual companies do not need to provide special bonuses to make the system worthwhile.
Over the period of time the average unemployment rate in Germany has been notably higher than in the US. It seems unreasonable to compare the performance of economies on spot years. If you want you could compare the 11.5% unemployment in Germany in 2005.
I suggest that criticizing governments who live with long term unemployment is pretty reasonable.
Some food for thought (though the later figures don't seem accurate): http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+gdp+growth+since+199... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+employment+since+199...
Germany's (previous) economic woes could be reflective of the pain of integrating E. Germany. But then again that illustrates the problem of comparing economies directly. For e.g. could the influx 'cheap' east German labor make the overall German economy more competitive.