If anything, the value of this is going to be negative: Germany will have to pay more to things like the EU, NATO, and 3rd-world aid, all of which are defined as a fixed percentage of GDP.
If anything, the value of this is going to be negative: Germany will have to pay more to things like the EU, NATO, and 3rd-world aid, all of which are defined as a fixed percentage of GDP.
I'm from a developing country with few independent local companies. We're basically the reductio ad absurdum for your comment.
Well, life does not magically become better if most of your local companies fail.
Don't root for local companies to fail and don't be exclusively a "trickle down economics" cynic. Companies still pay salaries, still pay taxes, still contribute to the development of related local industries.
The news article is jubilant about a half procent growth to the German GDP because of the corona vaccin. I'm asking what the _value_ of that half procent is.
I can totally understand if Germany has built new factories, or had some other economic activity that spread whatever new income is generated over a significant part of the population. But that's not the case here: it's a single company, making a shitload of money, but mostly abroad, from vaccins that are mostly produced abroad as well. That money goes into a very small number of pockets. It may boost the economic indicator called GDP but it does not represent wealth for the average German.
That "small number of pockets" is probably still mostly German. It could have been Chinese or Romanian or Botswanan and no German would have seen an eurocent. Plus, again, taxes, local development in adjacent industries, local talent staying local, a million other benefits.
Their gain is not necessarily your loss, especially since their product is a high tech product that doesn't seem to be based on technology stolen from anyone else, they created it.
It's still a victory for Germany and Germans, even if it wasn't achieved by the Grand-German-Workers-Collective-Where-All-1-Million-Employees-Are-Also-Shareholders (German probably has 1 big compound word for this :-D ).
Google tells me its Arbeitsgenossenschaft
> [BioNTech] now expects to accrue 15.9 billion euros ($18.63 billion) in revenue from the vaccine this year <...> “Since BioNTech procures relatively few preliminary products from abroad, this is almost entirely domestic added value,” Dullien said. “So this has a direct impact on economic growth.”