As part of the 2019 SME survey, companies in the Berlin/Brandenburg region were asked for the 15th time about their assessment of the current economic situation, their expectations for the future and their investment and financing plans.
The results show that the economic slowdown is not leaving Berlin’s domestic companies completely unscathed. Both the assessments of the business climate and the expected increase in personnel are more cautious. With companies still reluctant to invest, digitisation is one of the top three investment motives.
DIW Econ has for the second time comprehensively examined the importance of the tourism industry in North Rhine-Westphalia based on internationally comparable calculation standards in cooperation with the Institute for Management and Tourism (IMT) at the West Coast University of Applied Sciences and dwif-Consulting.
The central results confirm the growing importance of the tourism industry for NRW. Compared to the study published in 2013, tourism consumption in 2017 showed a nominal growth of 11.6 per cent.
DIW Weekly Report 36 / 2019, pp. 631-639
More than every fourth patent filed by large German companies is based on inventions made in their research laboratories abroad. In three-quarters of the cases, the companies concentrate on technologies in which they are also particularly strong in Germany. The technological performance of research and development at home thus largely determines the innovative strength of German companies operating worldwide.
Economic Bulletin No. 1 | 2019
Purchaser principle when buying residential property
One reason for the stagnating homeownership rate in Germany for years is often cited as the high ancillary acquisition costs, which discourage households with low equity in particular from buying property. In addition to land transfer tax, notary and land registry fees, the brokerage commission is also a significant factor. However, there is no uniform and cross-national regulation on the amount and distribution of the broker’s commission. For this reason, the introduction of a nationwide buyer’s principle for the purchase of residential property is being discussed to prevent a possible predicament of buyers. Who is protected from whom by the buyer principle and what the typical buyer and seller household looks like is examined in this Economic Bulletin “Who meets whom when buying property”.
The introduction of a nationwide buyer principle for the purchase of residential property is currently being discussed (draft law BMJV, 2019). In the future, the clients of the estate agents – mainly the sellers – would pay for the agent’s commission, so that the ancillary acquisition costs for buyers should decrease.
Whether this can be achieved with the buyer principle depends to a large extent on the probability of the sellers passing on the brokerage costs to the purchase prices. This study, commissioned by leading brokerage firms, therefore examines the potential effects of introducing the buyer-principle on a scientific and empirical basis.