Debate over the Benefits and Drawbacks of Foreign Investment in the Economy

Scholz said the following in the ZDF summer interview on Sunday: “In every economics course, the students learn that the success of an economy can be seen in the fact that its companies also invest abroad. Now I have to hear and read that from time to time that’s bad. That’s good.”

This causes a frown in Joachim Ragnitz, an economist at the Ifo Institute in Dresden. When asked by MDR AKTUELL, he responded with “Oh, did Scholz really say that?” Ragnitz believes that little good can be found in investments today: “You can imagine cases where companies invest abroad because they want to open up a market there, for example. I would say, yes, that’s a sign that the companies are competitive overall. But in the current situation, it’s more the case that many companies say, well, the energy supply in Germany is too expensive and possibly too uncertain. In other countries we get subsidies that we don’t get here and that’s why they go abroad. So you really can’t say that that’s a good thing.”