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A study of the social circumstances of self-employed people in Germany

DIW Econ has successfully completed the BMAS research project ‘Investigation of the social situations of self-employed persons in Germany’, in collaboration with infas – Institute for Applied Social Sciences. As part of the project, a nationwide survey of over 2,000 self-employed individuals in main and secondary employment was conducted in 2024. The survey covered topics such as their employment situation and history, income, finances, and social security provisions.

Power2Jobs – Employment Impact of Hydrogen Technologies

The hydrogen economy will play a decisive role in Germany’s green transformation in the coming decades. With its help, the goal of climate neutrality can be achieved while preserving German industry.
As part of the Hydrogen Atlas of Germany, the Power2Jobs subproject has investigated the potential significance of the hydrogen economy for regional labor markets.

At the bottom of this page, you will find a list of publications, which are accessible through links.

The working paper “Upstream employment effects of P2X production” provides benchmarks for the regional employment effects of hydrogen production in Germany.

The paper “Regional Hydrogen Relevance in Germany” compares the hydrogen-specific potential and challenge profiles of German counties.

Building on this, in the paper “Employment Effects of the Hydrogen Economy” we have ventured a look into the future of the steel and heavy industry labor market. We discuss how the two labor markets in Germany could change in the face of the emergence of new occupational groups and the disappearance and transformation of established occupational fields.

The changing world of work is also the focus of our fourth working paper. In it, we have documented our approach to measuring regional skills gaps, which was used in the context of Power2Jobs to assess the existing distribution of skills and knowledge in Germany’s regions against the backdrop of a hydrogen economy.

You can get a first insight into the results in interactive form at www.power2jobs.de.

The Hydrogen Atlas Germany is available at www.wasserstoffatlas.de.

Who benefits from the tax allowance for education, upbringing and training?

The current short expert report commissioned by the AWO Bundesverband e.V. sheds light on the distributional effects of the tax allowances for children. In particular, the allowance for care, education and training costs (BEA) currently favours high-income households more than low-income families. The study analyses how halving the CEA or reducing it to 300 euros would affect different groups of households.

The economic power behind housing

Residential construction has been a major contributor to Germany’s economic growth in recent decades. However, current forecasts point to a worrying decline in the real volume of residential construction, which could have far-reaching consequences. This development underlines the urgent need to strengthen residential construction as a driver of economic recovery.