[thomasdullien]

The "reduces their ability to compete"-argument does not hold water considering the data, though. One useful measure of a countries competitiveness is the size of their exports (because it implies that there is a lot of foreign demand for the products from that country), or in their "exports-to-population" ratio.

If you check https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports you can see that Germany exports about EUR 112bn worth of goods per month, on a population of about 83 million, about EUR 1350 per head. For comparison:

Canada exports about 49bn CAD per month, on a population of 38m, for approximately 1297 CAD per head.

The US exports about 208bn USD per month, on a population of 327m, for approximately 638 USD per head.

If anything, the big weakness of the German economy is not that it is not competitive enough, the big weakness of the German economy is a lack of domestic consumption due to not much of the money actually reaching workers pockets; this is a result of a fairly aggressive wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.

[jnordwick]

I've never heard of anybody using exports as development metric. It's usually just a sign of developing country with cheap labor.

> wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.

And imagine that. Seems to fit the low wage story pretty well.

[thomasdullien]

When speaking about "competitiveness", what measures aside from current account balance and share of global exports is better suited?

Not to be snarky, but you can't do any reading in economics about competitiveness and not encounter the current account balance (which is exports - imports): https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6701/trade/importance-of-...