Blog post

Gastarbeiter and the Wirtschaftswunder

Publishing date: 05 March 2008
Authors: Jakob von Weizsäcker

Jakob von Weizsäcker argues that Gastarbeiter were critical in establishing Germany‘s hugely successful cluster in the car industry. Looking forward, Europe‘s ability to agree on an open immigration policy for high-skilled immigration will be critical for the European knowledge industries to be able to compete.

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This comment was also published by Financial Times Deutschland.

About the authors

Jakob von Weizsäcker

Jakob von Weizsäcker heads the department for economic policy and tourism at the Thuringian Economics Ministry in Erfurt and is a non-resident fellow at Bruegel where he was resident fellow form 2005 to 2010.

He previously worked at the World Bank in Washington (2002-2005) where he was country economist for Tajikistan and the Federal Economics Ministry in Berlin (2001-2002) where he headed the office of a junior minister. Before that, he worked for Vesta, a venture capital firm, and held research positions at the Center for Economic Studies in Munich and CIRED in Paris.