Federalism, Unification and European Integration by Charlie Jeffery & Roland Sturm

Author:Charlie Jeffery & Roland Sturm [Jeffery, Charlie & Sturm, Roland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General
ISBN: 9780714645070
Google: k3Cyh1b76NYC
Goodreads: 6361111
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1993-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Structural Policy Initiatives in North Rhine-Westphalia

With these considerations in mind. North Rhine-Westphalian structural policy began to focus systematically on the above-mentioned ‘soft’ factors of location. The emphasis lay on building up the Land‘s material and institutional infrastructure and in particular on the strengthening of the labour infrastructure through the education system. In the latter field new universities were created and existing ones expanded, new research institutes were set up and everywhere levels of equipment were upgraded.2

In the 1970s and 1980s a considerable number of vocational training institutions (with over 20,000 full-time places) were also set up, providing apprenticeship places to over 95 per cent of applicants even at times of severe labour market slump. And since 1985 35 Regional Technology Centres have been established. Moreover some 20 Land-wide Technology and Innovation Initiatives, designed to work in concert, were started up and expanded.

An integrated network of further education and training institutions, technology and technology transfer centres were thus built up, based around and linked to universities, polytechnics and other specialist institutes. On the basis of this infrastructure North Rhine-Westphalia has created a uniquely dense and broad-based environment for education, science and research which was activated in the 1980s by means of a comprehensive structural policy in which professional education and technology policy were central components. The share of the North Rhine-Westphalian Economic Ministry’s3 budget devoted to regional structural policy tripled in the 1980s from 11.5 per cent to more than 35 per cent. If small business, training and technology initiatives are also included, then the figure adds up to some two-thirds of the Ministry’s budget. Training, science and technology policy were thus given a central position alongside small business policy and export promotion as instruments of structural policy.

The employment of these instruments in North Rhine-Westphalian structural policy was, moreover, a key, and in part even decisive, stimulus for new regional structural policy initiatives across Germany as a whole. This became clearly evident as the economic, social and political unification of Germany made the introduction of an extensive and broadly based regional aid policy an absolute necessity in the new Länder.

Alongside basic infrastructural investment for the Land as a whole, the North Rhine-Westphalian government has also, where possible, sought more specifically to promote structural adjustment in the individual subregions of the Land. Special programmes, like the ‘Zukunftsinitiative Montanregionen’, which was later expanded to the Land-wide programme ‘Zukunftsinitiative für die Regionen Nordrhein-Westfalerts’, have extended beyond training and technology policy to include the following in aspects of structural policy: energy conservation, socially and environmentally sound forms of production, the promotion of small business and an active equal opportunities policy for girls and women in educational, professional and economic life.

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