Rather, it is driven by the quality of machines West German manufacturers have to sell.

CENTERFORSECURITYPOLICY: Center for Security Policy | Submitted Testimony by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. on The Application Of National Security Export Controls To The East Bloc

Quality and competition in German professions compare well with the rest of Europe, says Rolf Koschorrek, president of the Federal Association of Liberal Professions and a Bundestag member from Mrs Merkel's own party.

ECONOMIST: German services: Protected and inefficient | The

Bechstein, a piano-maker, which shows just how far German companies will go in order to maintain quality.

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The answer is that a combination of schooling and apprenticeship has proved a reliable supplier and shaper of the sort of labour German businesses need to make goods of high quality, even as similar jobs have disappeared in other rich economies.

ECONOMIST: Education and skills

He withdrew to a house in the south to write art history, dismissed anti-German activists with lectures about realism (not a quality that loomed large during any other period of his life) and maintained friendly relations with a ferocious collaborationist, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle.

ECONOMIST: Intellectual adventurers

German and Italian banks report persistent pockets of credit-quality weakness and banks in America are watching the hot property market for signs of the same.

ECONOMIST: Buttonwood

Instead, it appeals to tech types who crave perfect picture quality and may not have the budget to purchase a German luxury vehicle on a whim.

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One thing they all have in common is that their income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is well below that of the US. In fact, the Scandinavian and German-speaking countries that consistently score well on a variety of business and quality-of-life surveys have some of the lowest inequality scores among developed nations.

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