IT SAYS MUCH about Germany that almost two decades after reunification, and several years after the creation of the eurozone, states of the German federation such as Baden-Württemberg feel that they need to maintain individual embassies in the German capital, while the sovereign nations of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden get by with a shared building. Then again, the economy of Baden-Württemberg is so different to that of Berlin that it might as well be a foreign country.
Baden-Württemberg is chock-full of world-class exporters, one of which, Porsche, is now under fire for paying its chief executive a package worth €70 million. Since Bayer’s acquisition of Schering last year, Berlin, by sad contrast, is no longer home to a single DAX30 company. Nor does it have much to offer by way of Mittelstand companies. According to the Bonn-based Institute for Mittelstand Research, while 97 of...
