Public economy

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Common economy generally refers to the totality of all economic forms in which the focus is not on private pursuit of profit , but on the well-being of a superordinate community ( common good ). In some cases, this also includes all publicly owned companies . In particular, common economy in Germany and Austria after the Second World War is understood to mean the network of union and cooperative companies. In the 1980s, the public economy in Germany collapsed after the prominent housing construction company “ Neue Heimat ” went bankrupt and most of the public sector companies were then sold.

Public enterprise

This article or paragraph presents the situation in Germany . Help us to describe the situation in other countries.

Weimar Republic

Since the 1920s, the German trade unions have founded a number of companies in various sectors (e.g. the Bank der Deutsche Arbeit ). This served various purposes, on the one hand to invest union assets, but also to use the unions' infrastructure as a sales channel. In return, the trade unions were able to send their members discounted offers, which served as an argument for recruiting members. Above all, however, these companies put themselves in the service of the ideology of the common economy: It should be shown that companies can survive in the market even without profit orientation and offer products and services better and cheaper.

time of the nationalsocialism

The National Socialists took up this idea and put it in the service of their cause. The unions have been brought into line , the union company in the Nazi organizations (eg. B. Kraft durch Freude , German Labor Front ) incorporated.

Post-war period until reunification

After the Second World War, the trade unions in the Federal Republic of Germany got their assets back and the opportunity to do business. As a result, the large public sector companies emerged:

These developed positively in the years of the economic miracle and up to the end of the 1970s in line with the general economy. Two main factors contributed to this: On the one hand, the public sector companies enjoyed a good reputation. They were associated with attributes such as “inexpensive”, “oriented towards the little man” and “non-profit”. In addition to the owner (the unions), it was primarily a commitment to social economy, which resulted in this image: In Hamburg many public service establishments were located, so Hamburg was designated as a city of social economy.

On the other hand, the union apparatus served as a distribution channel. Hundreds of thousands of works councils and union shop stewards made contact with potential customers. Customers who, although not among the strongest in purchasing power, were very loyal to the public service enterprise.

In the 1980s, the public service enterprises came into existence-threatening crises. The scandal surrounding the “Neue Heimat” brought the public enterprise into the headlines nationwide. The union assets in this housing association were wiped out. Even the sale for the symbolic price of one DM, in order to ward off further damage from the unions, failed. The near bankruptcy of the BfG was less spectacular, but far more expensive. Risky credit transactions led to billions in write-downs in the mid / late 1980s. The company was saved through a sale to Aachen-Münchener Versicherung and later to Crédit Lyonnais . However, the purchase price of Crédit Lyonnais in the amount of 1.5 billion euros had to be used to offset the accumulated losses. The co op AG did not survive. In 1989 it was broken up and sold after a settlement with the creditor banks.

The unions then said goodbye to the idea of ​​the common economy. The unions' remaining holdings have since been viewed as purely financial investments.

Recent public economic theory approach

The American Elinor Ostrom , who was the first woman to be awarded the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics in 2009 , has reopened the discussion about new forms of public economy with her research focus. In her fundamental work, Governing the Commons (1990), she proves that jointly used resources (= commons) are permanently superior to both state control and pure privatization in the case of local self-organization and compliance with certain organizational principles (in particular the principles of sanctions). These findings contradict the prevailing economic doctrine, which it previously unchallenged as so-called " tragedy of the commons called" when public service use supposedly historically inevitably overuse and overexploitation led. With this in mind, the Naturschutzbund Deutschland had a report prepared by the forest expert Wilhelm Bode in 2010 , which aims at the partial privatization of the NRW state forests in a so-called Bürgerwald AG in civic ownership, specifying the type of production (permanent mixed forest) and protecting blocking minorities in the hands of a state nature conservation foundation.

Research institutes

The International Community Research and Information Center

In 1947 Edgar Milhaud founded the International Research and Information Center for Community (Center international de recherches et d'information sur l'économie collective) (CIRIEC) in Geneva. In 1957 the headquarters was moved to Liège . After the death of Professor Milhaud in 1964, Paul Lambert, Guy Quaden in 1977 and, since 1990, Bernard Thiry, became President of CIRIEC.

CIRIEC is the publisher of the Annalen der Gemeinwirtschaft magazine , which appears in German, English and French. An international congress of the public economy takes place every two years.

Academy for Community Economy

The Academy for Community Economy was founded in Hamburg in 1948. In 1961 it was renamed the Academy for Economics and Politics , was the independent Hamburg University of Economics and Politics (HWP) from 1991 to March 31, 2005 and is now the Faculty of Social Economics at the University of Hamburg .

See also

literature

  • Rainer Weinert: The end of the common economy: trade unions and public enterprises in post-war Germany. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / New York 1994, ISBN 3-593-35086-6 .
  • Theo Thiemeyer : On the theory of the common economy in economics. In: Union monthly journal . 3/1972. ( online ; PDF; 126 kB)
  • Axel Weipert (ed.): Democratization of Economy and State - Studies on the Relationship between Economy, State and Democracy from the 19th Century to Today. NoRa Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86557-331-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Euchner , Helga Grebing : History of social ideas in Germany: Socialism - Catholic social teaching - Protestant social ethics; a manual. VS Verlag, 2005, p. 564.
  2. ^ Armin Peter: Hamburg - City of the community economy. In: It works better together. Cooperative traditions and perspectives. Norderstedt 2011, ISBN 978-3-8423-4957-5 , p. 58.
  3. ^ Walter Euchner, Helga Grebing: History of social ideas in Germany: Socialism - Catholic social teaching - Protestant social ethics; a manual. VS Verlag, 2005, p. 564.
  4. ^ Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1990, ISBN 0-521-40599-8 .
  5. ^ Wilhelm Bode: The NRW Bürgerwald concept. (PDF; 16.6 MB). NRW-NABU, May 2010.