IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ces/ifosdt/v53y2000i34p05-10.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

West German manufacturing: Investment growth to slow in 2001

Author

Listed:
  • Annette Weichselberger

Abstract

According to the results of the recent Ifo Investment Survey, west German manufacturers invested almost DM 92 billion in new buildings and equipment. This was a growth rate of nearly 6%. The strong economic upturn that the German economy is experiencing led firms to increase their investment budgets markedly since the beginning of the year, on average. In addition, investment projects planned for 2001 or later have been brought forward, to some extent, since the tax reforms that take effect in January 2001 will have less favourable depreciation allowances. The business situation of west German manufacturing continues to be good, thanks to lively export demand. Domestic demand, however, has weakened somewhat in recent months due to higher oil prices. In light of these slightly clouded sales expectations, firms have become somewhat more cautious regarding their investment plans for 2001. According to current survey evaluations, 39% of the queried firms expect to increase spending on new buildings and equipment in west Germany whereas 24% plan to reduce investment. The remaining 37% see no change in investment spending. Taking into consideration the rate of change reported by most of the firms, an investment increase of 4% (3% in real terms) is expected. The strongest growth in investment next year will be in the capital goods industry. As already in 2000, firms intend to invest primarily in replacement purchases, but expansion projects also play a large role. Nearly a quarter of investments will serve the expansion of capacities, according to the surveyed firms' plans for 2001. In contrast, capital expenditure on rationalisation will continue to lose importance, as it has over the past few years.

Suggested Citation

  • Annette Weichselberger, 2000. "West German manufacturing: Investment growth to slow in 2001," ifo Schnelldienst, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 53(34), pages 05-10, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:ces:ifosdt:v:53:y:2000:i:34:p:05-10
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • L60 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Manufacturing - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ces:ifosdt:v:53:y:2000:i:34:p:05-10. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klaus Wohlrabe (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ifooode.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.