Completed research project
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
The project analysed debates and decisions regarding subsidies as an instrument of coping with economic structural change in West Germany. It focussed on the period from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, during which overall economic growth problems and industrial adjustment crises transformed structural policy into a central field of politics (though one only examined selectively in historical research) with numerous protagonists – alongside the federal government, the individual states and the European Community, also enterprises and trade unions as well as science and the media. By understanding subsidies justified by structural policy as an expression of economic-political problem perception and the result of politico-societal negotiating processes, a bridge is to be built between economic history and general contemporary history.
Publications:
Ralf Ahrens/Astrid M. Eckert (Hg.), Industrial Policy in Western Europe since the 1960s. Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook 58 (2017), Heft 1.darin: Sectoral Subsidies in West German Industrial Policy: Programmatic Objectives and Pragmatic Applications from the 1960s to the 1980s, in: Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte / Economic History Yearbook 58 (2017), S. 59-82.
Der Interventionsstaat auf dem Rückzug? Industriepolitik im Bundeswirtschaftsministerium von Friderichs bis Bangemann, in: Frank Bösch/Thomas Hertfelder/Gabriele Metzler (Hg.), Grenzen des Neoliberalismus. Der Wandel des Liberalismus im späten 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart 2018, S. 213-237.
Teure Gewohnheiten. Berlinförderung und Bundeshilfe für West-Berlin seit dem Mauerbau, in: Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 102 (2015), S. 283-299
