30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Democracy and Market Economy

We thank all participants, speakers, panelists and organisers for the successful annual conference 2019. Here on flickr you can get some impressions.

Conference Programme

Download Programme (print version)

Core Conference 2019:

In the 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, the former planned economies in East Germany and Eastern Europe have undergone fundamental processes of change. In the new federal states, the economic structure has undergone fundamental changes, but convergence with the old federal states is not complete. The economic catching-up process of the transition countries of Eastern Europe, some of which are now members of the European Union, is continuing. Where are East Germany and the transition countries today? How have democratic institutions and market-economy structures developed in the transition countries? 

Three keynotes, given by Maria Petrova from the New Economic School in Moscow, Adam Szeidl from the Central European University in Budapest and Davide Cantoni from the LMU Munich, will shed light on developments in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and for comparison in China. A policy panel will discuss the current situation in the new German states against the background of the transformation processes to date.

Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Projektnummer 428925943.

Open Meeting:

The Annual Congress of the Verein fuer Socialpolitik consists of a core conference with invited lectures concerning “30 Years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Democracy and Market Economy” and of an Open Meeting with mixed topics. Presentations and Organised Sessions for the Open Meeting may be submitted from all fields of economics.

Accepted contributions will be published in EconStor, the online publication database of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Center Economy which is a part of the collection of all VfS conference contributions. Further publication is not intended by the Verein fuer Socialpolitik.

EconStor (www.econstor.eu) is a disciplinary publication server for the distribution of economics research papers in Open Access. It is maintained by the ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics. Making your conference paper on EconStor as a pre-publication available, increases the visibility of your research (e.g. via RePEc) and does not conflict with the submission to a scholarly journal. If necessary, papers on EconStor can be withdrawn and deleted at any time. Further information here. 

Programme Committee of the Open Meeting (Chair: Daniel Krähmer)

• Axel Dreher (University of Heidelberg)
• Ester Faia (University of Frankfurt)
• Christina Gathmann (University of Heidelberg)
• Peter Haan (German Institute for Economic Research Berlin)
• Christoph Kucmicz (University of Graz)
• Johannes Münster (University of Cologne)
• Markus Reisinger (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management)
• Melanie Schienle (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
• Karl Schmedders (University of Zurich)
• Nora Szech (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
• Christoph Trebesch (University of Kiel)