An Essay on Collective Bargaining and Unemployment in Germany

Abstract

Can Germany in the 1990s provide a contemporary example of the "uneasy triangle" posited by The Economist in the early 1950s? As the millennium approached, Germany's inflation rate was very low; its unemployment rate unacceptably high; and its system of collective bargaining arguably the strongest to be found in any major industrial country. Public opinion appears to have played a more limiting role in the first of these corners of Germany's triangles than in the other two.