Please don't read it, or forget what you read in it; not all work is good work, and you shouldn't value bad work; this article is a bad article.

Somebody said that. And currently It's true. (I live there aswell).

The most companies aren't very efficent when it comes to stuff like paperwork. Look at our governement. We could save lots of money if we would change a few things.

Also we are a nation that could only problems that needs a lot of work and are long living. We aren't good in rapidly changing things, like internet business. Let's look at our IT companies as an example. We have SAP. But SAP's business is around money which needs to be stable and can't emerge rapidly. Also when somebody in germany founds a super fast growing thing he will sell it really early. There is no billion dollar internet company.

I won't get into details, but here's some first hand observations: the health care is great, the pay is average, the taxes are high, the Internet is average, working hours are average and there is no minimum salary (also there are people who work 9-6 incl. Saturdays, mostly foreigners), people are great, crime is low, language is hard, opportunities through the roof, business is hard (esp. compared to the US and nearby UK), basic living prices are OK, but any "luxuries" are expensive.

I live in Germany. Coming from The Netherlands, it surprises me how inefficient Germany often is. A lot of administration is still done on paper. Government organisations barely communicate, e.g. probably half of my non-native co-workers had taxation problems in their first months as a result of that. For every minor thing, you have to fill in a form.

The private sector is not much better. E.g. in NL I could arrange virtually all my banking affairs via internet. Here, except for some internet banks (such as the non-German ING DiBa), you have to go to an office to arrange anything. In NL, most local branches are gone from villages and are slowly retracting from cities as well. Here you have many branches in a small city, with many employees (probably because stuff is all handled on paper) and royal interiors. And then you have to go to the bank every couple of weeks to print your statements using a machine (I am not making this up).

Compared to Northern European countries, there is a huge space for increasing efficiency.

there is no minimum salary

Yes. This is I dislike very much too, it's hard to see people working hard, only earning a few Euros per hour in an extremely rich society. Luckily, Germany may finally see a minimum wage now that the SPD is part of the government again.

My impression is that Germany requires a lot of paperwork, but this paperwork is often well guided and backed by organizations that are reasonably big and efficient. So the inefficiencies of living in a "paper bureaucracy" where you have to fill out a form for everything are there, but people barely notice them because the bureaucratic machine is well oiled.

The problem is that if you happen to meet one of the not well oiled parts of the mechanism you will be crushed by the bureaucracy. But this is mostly a foreigners' problem, so it not a very important part of the political agenda.

    *there is no minimum salary*
    
    Yes. This is I dislike very much too, it's hard to see
    people working hard, only earning a few Euros per hour
    in an extremely rich society. 

    Luckily, Germany may finally see a minimum wage now that 
    the SPD is part of the government again.

And I do so many things on internet - getting internet connection, subscribing to electricity providers etc, and direct debit or online banking works here as well.

I have lived in Netherlands too, and I think NL is more efficient and has automated lot of things though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP...

And while the stats here are collated, it's not nearly as worthless a measure as nominal GDP of the whole country.

In Europe (according to Eurostat so possibly using comparable methodology), they're behind France.

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init...

1. How are work hours measured, do they include overtime, etc.

2. How is "productivity" measured? Eg: if an American company has a factory in China, then are the man-hours in those factories accounted for in a reasonable way, because the profits of those products are probably being counted. Or maybe the measures only calculate the value added by American workers.

The US is the world's second largest manufacturing economy, and just until recently was in front of China.

If you have a manufacturing sector roughly the size of the entire economy of France or Russia or Brazil, and that doesn't qualify as having a manufacturing economy, then no country qualifies as such.

Also the list could also mean that you guys have more super rich people. Since it's only a measurement per people. So if your rich guys will buy a lot of stuff it will get up really quickly.

Also the numbers are rising in EVERY country even when MORE people getting POOR. So these numbers are just indications that a lot of things go wrong in our world.

In particular, the figure I quoted has been adjusted to try to account for differences in the cost of living in the 2 countries ("purchasing power parity"), but I doubt the adjustment takes into account the fact that Americans spend more for health care while enduring worse health outcomes than Germans do -- or the fact that American spend more on prisoners while enduring higher rates of crime than Germans do.

(I never meant to imply that the US is superior to Germany, just to illuminate one of the limitations of the OP.)

In reality Germany is just an export nation with solid centuries-old world-known brands, a currency of an emerging country [0] and stagnating wages [1], producing luxury and investment goods, while Asia's growth creates demand for these like crazy.

[0]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2013/06/20/greece-d...

[1]: http://www.diw.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=diw_01.c.342374.de

But the office habits are very different, in France people leave the office way later than in Germany or the US (6 or 7pm), so it's quite a shock for some foreigners (basically our lunch break is longer, and our coffee breaks are shorter). You might have trouble getting a hold of people on Friday afternoon because they might take it off, and more and more on Wednesday (some people just take a 20% salary cut and spend one day with their kids).

In article, it compares with US, documentary compares with UK.

Machines could do the work of lots of people and Germany has lots of capital, lots of automation and lots of organization.

What I hate about Germany is their Winter. I would happily live there 6 months a year, the other six in Argentina, SA or Australia.

http://www.businessinsider.com/are-the-french-the-most-produ...