Against the mainstream: Nazi privatization in 1930s Germany

The Great Depression spurred State ownership in Western capitalist countries. Germany was no exception; the last governments of the Weimar Republic took over firms in diverse sectors. Later, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership and public services to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in the Western capitalist countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s. Privatization in Nazi Germany was also unique in transferring to private hands the delivery f public services previously provided by government. The firms and the services transferred to private ownership belonged to diverse sectors. Privatization was part of an intentional policy with multiple objectives and was not ideologically driven. As in many recent privatizations, particularly within the European Union, strong financial restrictions were a central motivation. In addition, privatization was used as a political tool to enhance support for the government and for the Nazi Party.

Stochastic Population Projection for Germany - based on the Quadratic Spline approach to modelling age specific fertility rates

This contribution builds upon a former paper by the authors (Lipps and Betz 2004), in which a stochastic population projection for East- and West Germany is performed. Aim was to forecast relevant population parameters and their distribution in a consistent way. We now present some modifications, which have been modelled since. First, population parameters for the entire German population are modelled. In order to overcome the modelling problem of the structural break in the East during reunification, we show that the adaptation process of the relevant figures by the East can be considered to be completed by now. As a consequence, German parameters can be modelled just by using the West German historic patterns, with the start-off population of entire Germany. Second, a new model to simulate age specific fertility rates is presented, based on a quadratic spline approach. This offers a higher flexibility to model various age specific fertility curves. The simulation results are compared with the scenario based official forecasts for Germany in 2050. Exemplary for some population parameters (e.g. dependency ratio), it can be shown that the range spanned by the medium and extreme variants correspond to the s-intervals in the stochastic framework. It seems therefore more appropriate to treat this range as a s-interval covering about two thirds of the true distribution.

"Parlamentarismen" som partskhetens inkarnation : en analys av Sveriges politiska debatt 1900-1920

Artikkeli perustuu tekijän 1998 Jyväskylän yliopiston valtio-opin laitokselle tekemään pro gradu-työhön "Makten från svunna tider - mot framtiden : om 'parlamentarismen'i den svenska politiska 1900- och 1910-talsdebatten"