Five percent of all German foreign investments flow into the reforming countries of Eastern Europe: 33.6 billion Euros up to 2001. German businesses invested in privatized branches like telecommunications and energy, and German chain stores expanded. Local branches of Metro, Deichmann, Rossmann, and Lidl* line the access roads to major [Eastern European] cities. Publishing houses have also discovered the new market in the East. Springer Publishing House introduced a Polish edition of Newsweek, and its tabloid Fakt became the largest newspaper in Poland within just a few months.
As a group, the candidates for accession are already Germany’s most important trade partners –even ahead of France and the United States. Both imports and exports have increased continuously since the beginning of the 1990s; in some years the growth rate was as high as 16 percent.
Since 1993 the value of traded goods has increased fivefold, whereby Germans have usually exported more than they imported. In some years, the export surplus was more than six billion Euros. “Made in Germany” has a good ring to it in the East, and German cars and machinery are prized. The foreign trade balance has even reversed slightly in the meantime due to the expansion of industry there.
For example, the Schuler Corporation, located in Göppingen, Baden-Württemberg, is the leading manufacturer of metal presses worldwide. In 1999, the company set up an entire production hall for car bodies at the Skoda plant in the Czech Republic. At the beginning of the year, it also received orders to supply press machines for Peugeot in Slovakia and Renault in Slovenia. In the last fiscal year alone, the company, with a workforce of 4,000, received orders worth around 560 million Euros, a large part of which came from Eastern Europe.
Business in Eastern Europe is lucrative even for small and medium-sized family companies. C.H. Erbslöh, a distributor for specialty chemicals, opened its first sales office in Poland in 1997. “If the Eastern European economy wants to be competitive, it cannot avoid purchasing quality products in Germany,” said company director Carl Hugo Erbslöh.
Economists have predicted an outright boom in the countries of Eastern Europe once they join the European Union. Some even speak of a second economic miracle. But in fact it will take decades for the new countries to catch up with the old Europe economically.
The gap between West and East within the new European Union is correspondingly large. Whether one considers economic strength, social and economic standards, or infrastructure – the European Union now includes countries that differ dramatically from the established members.
Of all the Eastern accession countries, only Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Hungary have a gross domestic product (GDP) that, based on purchasing power, is more than fifty percent of the previous EU average of roughly 24,000 Euros. In comparison: the new federal states in Germany, whose development fourteen years after reunification can certainly be regarded as a failure, have reached 70 percent of the EU average – but only with the help of the 1,250 billion Euros invested in Eastern Germany since unification.
* Metro is a German supermarket chain, Deichmann is a shoe store chain, Rossmann is a pharmacy chain, and Lidl is a low-cost supermarket chain – trans.
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