Beyond semi-sovereignty? Economic governance in Germany

Although William Paterson is probably best known for his work on Germany and European integration, he has, in keeping with his status as a Universalgelehrter in this field, made a number of key interventions in other areas of contemporary German Studies, including some seminal insights into the study of economic governance in Germany. On a more applied level, this has taken the form of writing regular reports for some 13 years on business and economic policy in Germany for the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). On the academic level, his reputation in this area rests both on a highly regarded collection of essays on the future of the German model which he co-edited with Rebecca Harding (Harding and Paterson, 2000a), as well as on the still widely cited study of the economic governance of the chemical industry in West Germany and the United Kingdom, which Paterson undertook together with colleagues at Warwick University (Grant, Paterson and Whitston, 1988). In this, Paterson and his collaborators elucidated systematically and comparatively the structures and institutional relationships in one key sector, with the aim of shedding new light onto the question of whether either country’s system of economic governance could be viewed as superior in terms of the outcomes it generated. In particular, Paterson in this book examined the impact of the often ‘clientelistic’ links between especially the Verband der Chemischen Industrie and the main regulatory ministry, the Federal Economics Ministry (Grant, Paterson and Whitston, 1988, pp. 84-87), a pattern which he and his collaborators argued in later work was replicated in other European countries too (Grant, Paterson and Whitston, 1989).