Overview publications

Measures to promote technological sovereignty vary greatly from country to country and range from the promotion of R&D activities to subsidies for the construction of industrial plants. Systematic forecasting of technology trends would enable policy makers to deal with new technologies at an early stage and adapt policies and institutions.

This paper examines the impact of different cultural values, attitudes and similar attributes on some of the key dimensions of economic performance. It shows a weak correlation between the relative endowment of continental countries with some cultural attributes and the relative performance of their economies.

Europe ‒ once a leader in industrial development and innovation ‒ has lost its competitiveness. Which place will it take in a new world order? Climate protection and the digital transformation will also influence the next era of prosperity. The EU and its member states now want to build a robust, secure, resilient, and sustainable economy. Meanwhile, the US, China, and some emerging economies have overtaken the EU in many international rankings.

This article shows how Facebook interests can be used to construct subnational measures of patience (“the relative valuation of present versus future payoffs”). Differences in patience are closely related to regional student performance in Italy and the United States. The results provide new perspectives on long-standing differences between the countries.

One reason why the European asylum system is overloaded is the lack of opportunities to enter the EU legally. Especially for low-skilled people, the chances of obtaining work visas in Europe are vanishingly small. Here is what the EU and Germany could do about it.

A joint energy and climate action policy could save European countries EUR 248 billion by 2050. This is the result of a study simulating different scenarios. In the worst-case scenario, the total costs could reach EUR 8.629 trillion.

The Russian attack on Ukraine in February 2022 marked not only a turning point (Zeitenwende) for German security policy but also for German foreign economic policy. From a European standpoint, the war served as a painful reminder of how economic dependencies can be used as political leverage, bringing the geopolitical dimension of trade relations and economic interdependencies into public focus. In particular, economic ties with the People’s Republic of China are increasingly being scrutinized. The ifo Institute conducted a representative survey with German firms in February 2024 to assess changes in their reliance on Chinese inputs since the outbreak of the war and firms’ plans regarding their supply relationships with China.

The EU is losing the global innovation race. EU industry invests less than its peers in R&D, it lags way behind in software and artificial intelligence, and its pharmaceutical component is at risk. For over 20 years the same companies, mostly from the automotive sector, have dominated EU innovation activity. 

Populism is on the rise. It goes hand in hand with far-left or far-right party slogans and/or strong, personalized political leadership and polarized rhetoric: The presidency of Donald Trump in the US and the campaigns for the Brexit referendum are two prominent examples in recent years. Several EU member states, namely France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Greece, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Germany, have experienced how quickly populists win voters in national elections. With the presidential election in the US and European elections in 2024, many people fear a further rise in political polarization and populism in the Western world.

How far away is the world from ensuring that every child obtains at least basic skills? And what would it mean for world development to reach the goal of global universal basic skills? This article addresses these two intertwined questions in a new study. The authors draw on the individual-level test data from available international and regional student assessments to develop world estimates of the share of children not achieving basic skills in each country and then show the economic costs of these deficits.