FOCUS: The New Germany A United Germany in the New Europe

Last October the German Ambassador to Britain delivered the annual Gresham Special Lecture in Gresham College in the City of London. The text of His Excellency's lecture is reproduced here with permission.     

Emerging powers as fact and metaphor: Some European ideas

Emerging powers appear to be rather diverse although some of them, like China and India, are mapping the world. They can be countries or regions, social scapes and flows, economic networks or global cities. They emerge after several decades of global flexible capitalism and the rise of regional networks and city-states. In order to meet contemporary challenges, emerging powers need the experience of coherence of older homogeneities as well as the complexities of extended, differentiated societies and social structures. This new step in recent globalization has to be mediated and understood. The European cultural memory of conflict, mediation and negotiation may enable Europeans to let emerging powers grow beyond the world of traditional empires and their global economies, beyond the worlds of nation-states and their international economy, and beyond the world of liberal empires and their global economy. This reflexivity and complexity may enable the social sciences to play an important public role, which they have not had for many decades, if they understand their moment.     

LAFTA’s successes and failures

The Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA), established by the Treaty of Montevideo in 1960, was an attempt by the participating countries to seek a way out of the dilemma of declining demand for their exports, on the one hand, and the inadequacy of a solely inward-looking strategy in development policy, on the other.     

White-collar unionisation in West Germany, 1960–1976

The rapid growth of white-collar trade union membership in the UK in recent years has been paralleled by a similar phenomenon in Germany. Hermann Bayer and his colleagues explain the causes and results of the growth in trade unionism in West Germany against a background of socio-political developments.     

Contextual Framing and Monetary Incentives in Field Experiments on Risk Preferences: Evidence from German Farmers

Recent studies cast doubt on the ability of abstract experiments to predict decision‐making in the field. Thus, scholars have argued for more ‘realism’ by introducing context to field experiments. Yet, such realism may work against the induced values of monetary incentives in economic experiments. It is an open question whether contextual framing works best with or without inducing values, through methods such as the use of monetary incentives. Using a sample of 146 German farmers, we compare experimentally the predictive power of a framed lottery in an agricultural context vs. using an abstract version. For one half of the sample, lotteries are incentivised; for the other half, they are hypothetical. Although risk preferences differ between treatments, all four lottery tasks correlate poorly with farmers’ real‐world use of risk management instruments such as harvest or hail insurance. Subjects who start with an agricultural framing are willing to take significantly greater risks in the lotteries. More generally, our findings cast doubt on the ability of lottery tasks to predict risk‐taking in the field.