ABSTRACT
When dealing with a comparatively long time span of economic development-in this case almost one hundred years-the problem arises whether it would be preferable to concentrate on long-term trends in fields like economic growth and fluctuations, public finance and foreign trade or divide them into smaller periods of time and then investigate the particular features of those periods in more detail. While the first option would have had much to commend it I have mainly relied on the second alternative, although in the second half of the book I have stressed trends which were in the forefront of Federal German economic development in the second half of the twentieth century and which originated in the first half or even in the nineteenth century. In dealing with the first half of the twentieth century I have relied on divisions familiar from political history.
