Germany, adaptability
Kurzarbeit in the 2008-2009 crisis
Germany answered the 2008-2009 collapse in manufacturing orders by paying firms to cut hours instead of jobs, and short-time work covered 1.44 million workers at the May 2009 peak, about 5 percent of insured employment, while unemployment barely rose.
1,440,000 workers, workers in cyclical short-time work at the peak, 2009-05. IAB, the research institute of the Bundesagentur fuer Arbeit, IAB-Kurzbericht 17/2020, citing Statistik der BA, retrieved 2026-08-27.
The move, and what it needed
The employment agency reimburses firms most of the net wage for hours not worked when demand collapses, converting the existing unemployment-insurance fund into a payroll bridge, and the 2009 government lengthened the entitlement and cut the paperwork.
Preconditions
- A standing legal instrument and fund, so scaling needed a regulation rather than a new law
- Works councils and employers used to negotiating hours
- A shock read as temporary, since the bridge only pays off if demand returns
Where it travelled: Short-time work schemes spread across the OECD after 2009 and nearly everywhere in 2020. The lesson that travelled worst is fiscal: the bridge is cheap only when the crisis is short.
Limits: The count says how many workers were covered, not what the scheme cost, how much of the covered work would have survived anyway, or whether it slowed reallocation to better firms, which are the standard criticisms. The instrument long predates 2008; what the episode evidences is the speed at which an existing legal instrument was expanded inside one year. The same instrument covered over six million people in 2020, so the 2009 number is not its ceiling.
This record describes what Germany delivered. It is linked to Institutional responsiveness because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from Germany
1 other delivery from this country.
The Fraunhofer contract-research model
Germany funds the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft's institutes in proportion to what they earn from industry, and in 2025 the society performed 3.2 billion euros of contract research, 966 million euros of it paid by industry.
The same gap elsewhere
5 deliveries linked to Institutional responsiveness in other countries.
Plano Real, the 1994 currency stabilisation
Brazil ended four decades of high inflation with a staged currency reform, taking annual consumer price inflation from 2,075.9 percent in 1994 to 3.2 percent in 1998.
Proalcool, the fuel substitution after the oil shock
Brazil answered the 1973 oil shock by mandating ethanol blending and building a national fuel alcohol industry, taking production from 580 thousand cubic metres in 1975 to 38,199 in 2025, and from 2003 flex-fuel engines moved the choice to the driver.
The Convertibility Plan, and its collapse
Argentina ended hyperinflation by fixing the peso to the dollar by law in April 1991, taking annual inflation from 4,923 percent in 1989 to 3.9 percent in 1994, and the regime held until it collapsed in the 2001-2002 crisis.
The 2001 stabilisation, and its unwinding
Turkey answered its 2001 banking collapse with central bank independence, bank restructuring and fiscal rule, taking inflation from 54.4 percent in 2001 to 8.6 percent in 2004, and after 2018 the same framework was overridden until inflation reached 72.3 percent in 2022.
Telebras, the telecom system that was dismantled
Created in 1972, Telebras coordinated Brazil's state telecom system until its 1998 privatisation, when 54 concessionaires were split out and the state moved from operating the network to regulating and universalising service.