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Business Daily: Saving Germany's jobs

08/09/2010

Saving Germany's jobs

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Saving Germany's jobs

Germany's economy is booming and unemployment is falling. Is it thanks to job subsidies?

Germany's economy is booming and unemployment is falling. Is it thanks to job subsidies? We look at the German social safety net which was meant to preserve up to a million jobs through the recession.

Despite growing fears about the finances of some European countries, Germany's economy is booming. But how much of this is due to the social safety-net which preserved German jobs?

Lesley Curwen speaks to Bernd Drouven, chief executive of Aurubis, Europe's biggest copper producer. Last year she travelled to the plant in Hamburg and saw how hundreds of workers had been put on 'short-time working' where the state subsidises employers to keep staff, even when work dries up. Now, Dr Drouven says the measure was excellent, an ideal way to bring people through the worst of the recession.

Plus, is environmental romanticism getting in the way of managing lucrative resources such as oil and minerals?  Lesley Curwen talks to Professor Paul Collier, Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, who tackles this issue in his book 'The Plundered Planet'.

And our technology commentator Jeremy Wagstaff courts heresy; he asks, if Google is losing its way?

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