A study claims to have found that it is the poor health of Germans that led the country into recession. Can this be?
The statement sounds outrageous – and unbelievable: one study The Association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies (VfA) comes to the conclusion that the “sick man of Europe” – as Germany is repeatedly referred to – only slipped into recession because of poor health. The authors write: “Significant loss of work led to considerable losses in production – without the above-average sick days, the German economy would have grown by almost 0.5 percent.”