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...good news from Germany is that lots of money buys lots of stuff. Halle today has a new network of fast highways and rail tracks, a renovated historic city center, ultramodern water-treatment plants, a technology center on the site of a former Soviet army base just outside town, and - most needed of all - thousands of solid new jobs in a rebuilt industrial sector that has become home to U.S. firms such as computer maker Dell and Dow Chemical. Mayor Szabados waves to a corner of her office. Leaning up against the wall there are two dozen new shovels, several...
Szabados is quick to acknowledge, however, that not all the money has been well spent. There was the housing development built in a hurry in a wooded area south of town that now stands largely empty. "If we'd thought about it properly, we wouldn't have done it," she admits. Then there are the government-sponsored job-creation programs that failed to live up to their name, and the startups that quickly shut down again because they depended more on government subsidies than on a smart business plan. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...still far from being a happy place. Its population has shrunk dramatically, falling by more than one-quarter to 230,000 since 1990 as young people have left to find jobs elsewhere. Despite the exodus, and a birthrate that has dwindled to almost nothing, the town still has an unemployment rate of about 14%, double that in the old West Germany. And as a new economic crisis strikes - this time a global one - Halle isn't immune. Its economy has crashed in the past six months. Across the region - but especially in places like the town of Eisenach, where...
...attempts to woo industry through subsidies work so well. While Dresden has managed to reinvent itself as a micro-electronics "cluster," a similar attempt by the town of Frankfurt an der Oder failed. Around eastern Germany, there are numerous examples of industries without real prospects being kept alive artificially, complains Holznagel of the Taxpayers' Federation, citing tilemaking and leather-treatment plants on the Baltic coast. "The subsidies just prolong the death," he says, "but it comes anyway...
...eastern stoicism helps, too. "I notice that when I'm in the west, the fear of this economic crisis is much greater than in the east," says Halle's Mayor Dagmar Szabados. "We've been steeled by crisis here." That may be true; but as the state of her town proves, being steeled by a crisis is not the same as rebounding from a slump into prosperity. The rest of the world: take note...