Does Austria’s economy need to adapt to changes in the economic environment?
Austria has established a reputation as a well performing economy. Among the European countries, Austria belongs to the group of five with the highest GDP per capita since the end of the 1980s. Unemployment in Austria has been consistently at the lower end within the EU and the OECD. Yet, in recent years the Austrian growth performance has weakened relative to the other high income countries and unemployment, while still being relatively low, has increased to levels hardly known in the past. The weakening of Austria’s growth performance is largely reflected in weaker employment generation whose adverse effects were not offset by higher productivity growth. Growth developments 1. Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, Ireland were selected from the EU on the basis of the highest average GDP per capita level in 1995 prices and PPP (excluding Austria, Luxemburg, Germany, France), 1991-2002. The EU5 growth rates are weighted averages of country growth rates, weights as in the OECD Econ
