From CNBC, September 4:
- The “sick man of Europe” moniker has resurfaced in recent weeks as manufacturing output continues to stutter in the region’s largest economy and the country grapples with high energy prices.
- “It is not a short-term phenomenon,” Sinn said when speaking to CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick at the Ambrosetti Forum in Italy.
- There are growing signs of public disenchantment in the shift to a more sustainable Europe, with a so-called “greenlash” emerging as people feel the cost impacts.
Germany is once again the “sick man of Europe,” according to Hans-Werner Sinn, president emeritus at the Ifo institute, and the challenges that poses, particularly in terms of the country’s energy strategy, could serve to benefit increasingly popular right-wing parties.
The “sick man of Europe” moniker has resurfaced in recent weeks as manufacturing output continues to stutter in the region’s largest economy and the country grapples with high energy prices. The label was originally used to describe the German economy in 1998 as it navigated the costly challenges of a post-reunification economy....
....MUCH MORE
For years I thought the term was originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire:
Why was the Ottoman Empire called “the sick man of Europe”?
After the peak of Ottoman rule under Süleyman the Magnificent in the 16th century, the Ottoman Empire struggled to maintain its bloated bureaucracy and decentralized political structure. Several attempts at reform kept the empire afloat but mostly addressed immediate issues, and any success was short-lived. The most far-reaching of these reforms, the Tanzimat, contributed to a debt crisis in the 1870s. Its fragile state left it unable to withstand defeat in World War I, and most of its territories were divided as spoils as the empire disintegrated.
Also Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition (1911), Volume XXVII (Tonalite - Vesuvius) page 460.
