AAt the industry conference at the end of November, Robert Habeck dropped the announcement for the first time, shortly before Christmas he followed up in a paper with his French counterpart Bruno Le Maire: According to the Federal Minister of Economics, 2023 should be dominated by industrial policy. After he spent the first year in office largely procuring replacements for the missing Russian gas, it should now be about what the Greens actually started for: the conversion of the economy to climate neutrality. Whether electromobility, hydrogen or heat pumps: Germany should make faster progress in all these areas. This should succeed above all with more subsidies – just like the American government is currently zealously distributing with its “Inflation Reduction Act”.
Economists see the “European green industrial policy” – the title of the position paper from Berlin and Paris – with mixed feelings. “Basically, I’m not a friend of industrial policy,” says Monika Schnitzer, chairwoman of the German Council of Economic Experts, which advises the federal government on economic policy. But the world has changed, says the Munich economist, referring to the subsidies in China and the United States. “Of course you can say that we benefit from their cheap products, but we also make ourselves dependent on them. The EU must become more sovereign between these two blocs. And that’s where industrial policy can help,” says Schnitzer.