Word: pieroth
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Everything depends on how the East German economy responds to a free-market jump start. Pohl points out that "no one can subsidize uneconomic jobs in the G.D.R. forever." Elmar Pieroth, a prominent West Berlin politician and businessman who advises the G.D.R government, insists, "The spirit of entrepreneurship is reappearing, and people are eager to take advantage of the possibilities." That was the kind of spirit that created the Wirtschaftswunder...
...Pieroth insists that unemployment can be kept to a manageable 500,000, or 5.5%. Part of his strategy is to encourage Westerners involved in joint ventures to retrain workers whose skills are made obsolete. Pieroth also plans - to generate new jobs by pumping up to $12 billion in public and private funds annually for several years into rebuilding East Germany's decrepit infrastructure...
...will be eased further by the estimated 1 million East German workers who will be occupied over the next two years filling orders placed by the Soviet Union. Bonn has pledged that a unified Germany will honor those contracts. "The Soviets cannot generate economic success on their own," says Pieroth, "and it is in no one's interest for them to fail...
Private investments from West Germany will fund most of East Germany's makeover, but the Bonn government will bear the huge costs of swapping the East's nonconvertible currency for deutsche marks and establishing social benefits, like unemployment insurance, in the East. But Pieroth insists that those expenditures will be offset by an additional one to two percentage points of economic growth he reckons will be created in West Germany by new business opportunities in the East...
...many East Germans, Pieroth is a trenchant symbol of an unwanted West German economic anschluss with East Germany. "The process of developing our own character won't be advanced by flying in experts with their own agendas," says Wolfgang Templin, a member of the parliament from the leftist, ecology- minded Initiative for Peace and Human Rights. To develop a free-market economy, Templin and other critics maintain, East Germany does not have to ape the economy of West Germany. But that is precisely what East Germans voted for overwhelmingly last month, Pieroth responds. Says he: "We can't dictate...