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...Companies often cannot make capital expenditures to invest in cleaner technologies in a deep and prolonged recession. A firm may save money long-term by converting facilities to solar power, but if they do not have money for the initial financial investment, that will not matter...
...done well. In the Saxon heartland, where the local economy had strong roots going back to before World War II, Dresden has turned itself into a world center for semiconductors, Leipzig has attracted automakers including BMW and Porsche, and Jena has successfully built on the reputation of its optical firm, Carl Zeiss. But for the most part, eastern Germany is still far from resembling the "blossoming landscapes" that former Chancellor Helmut Kohl predicted back in 1990. True, living standards have soared thanks to the cash infusions, giving easterners more than 80% of the purchasing power of their western compatriots...
...collection of heavily subsidized industrial white elephants, all built at the taxpayers' expense. "Floodlit sheep meadows," grumbles Reiner Holznagel, managing director of the German Federation of Taxpayers. "In every district you can find projects that make you shake your head." Among the most egregious: the now-bankrupt firm Cargolifter, which tried to build a modern Zeppelin airship with tens of millions of government dollars. (See pictures of the Top 10 scared traders...
Once the Wall fell, those chemical factories were among the first casualties of reunification. Investors such as Dow, Dell, French oil giant Total and Belgian chemical and pharmaceutical firm Solvay moved in, enticed in large part by the subsidies Germany was offering to companies willing to take the obsolete mammoths off its hands. But welcome as the newcomers were, they quickly shuttered the old plants and hired only a fraction of the workers - about 20% of those who had previously toiled at Buna and Leuna. Unemployment soared as high as 30%. People started to leave Halle to find work elsewhere...
There's no doubt this public spending produced some results. The U.S. semiconductor firm AMD, for example, was planning to build a new plant in Ireland. In 1995, however, it switched to the Dresden area - once a high-tech region for the whole Soviet bloc - where it now employs about 2,000 people. Similarly, on the edge of Halle's Neustadt, in a brand-new technology center built on the site of the former Soviet army base, Katja Heppe pulls the claws of a snow crab out of a plastic bag. She's 29, a biotechnology researcher who specializes...