In the seventies and eighties, the Austrian socio-economic development was similar, in essential features, to that of the most advanced countries of the world and in particular of Western Europe, with which the Austria it is increasingly economically integrated. While the Austrian economy has not been exempt from the profound changes taking place in the world economic and political geosystem, it has better withstood the impact of the recessions that followed the two oil shocks, i.e. the two significant price increases (late 1973 and 1979) and was able to contain its negative effects, at least until the mid-1980s. This is due both to the policies practiced and to the structural characteristics of the Austrian economy.
The presence of an industrial structure characterized on the one hand by the prevalence, in most of the production of consumer goods, of small and medium-sized private enterprises, and on the other hand by the dominance of the public enterprise in industry, was decisive in this regard. mining and large industries of basic production goods (iron and steel, metallurgy, heavy engineering and primary chemicals), that is, in the sectors most affected by the crisis-restructuring of the industrial geosystem on a global scale. This structure has allowed both a better and more rapid adaptation, due to the flexibility of small firms, to the new market conditions, and to graduate the restructuring process of large industry and in particular to contain the inevitable reduction in employment. Public enterprises – which in 1984 still represented 20% of employment and 22% of industrial production – thus continued to work overall at a loss and burden the state budget, whose deficit (5% of GDP in 1986), although less heavy than in other advanced countries, it was increasing rapidly. This deficit was also due to other measures of the expansionary policy adopted up to then by the Austrian government and, last but not least, to the growing aging of the Austrian population which, together with the early retirement policy, determined the pension fund deficit and constitutes a structural limit to the containment of public expenditure. The incidence of federal debt on GDP increased from 10.3% in 1973 to 42.7% in 1986. Although smaller than elsewhere, these difficulties and, in particular, felix. The election of K. Waldheim as president of the Austrian Republic (June 8, 1986), which aroused lively criticism and indignation of many for his Nazi past, and the formation of a new government in this sense also contributed to this. for the first time the Social Democratic Party cohabits with the People’s Party, the party of the new president. For Austria 2001, please check naturegnosis.com.
However, favored by the economic recovery which in 1988 registered a new boom industrial in Western countries, the Austrian economy strengthened and at the end of the 1980s it was among the most stable, so much so that it became a candidate for a ” safe ” of foreign capital, such as neighboring Switzerland. Among the main structural transformations of the last twenty years there are first of all those common to all advanced countries: the reduction of the weight of industry (38% of GDP in 1989), the continuous contraction of agriculture (3%), which I see the growth in services to families and especially to businesses. Considerable transformations have also taken place on the industrial fabric, such as widespread urbanization, that is to say the greater relative growth of small cities compared to large ones, which represents one of the reflections of the crisis in large industry,
In Austria this change is evidenced not so much by the contraction of the population of Vienna, which has been downsizing for some time, as by the substantial stationary nature of cities such as Linz, Graz and even Innsbruck and Salzburg. Therefore, it is not attributable only to the overall demographic growth of the country, which also affects especially in Austria, where it was particularly scarce (7,596,081 residents in 1988, i.e. only about 120,000 more than in 1971 and partly foreign immigrants) and that in the 1980s it was zero (in 1988 the birth rate and mortality were around 11ı). Furthermore, the trend towards shifting the demographic and economic center of gravity towards the West, due to the growing integration with theWestern Länder, the decline and downsizing of heavy industries in the Eastern Länder.
From 1971 to 1988, the Austria Superiore, Salzburg, Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Carinthia register an increase in population, while the Austria Inferiore remains stationary and Vienna, Burgenland and Styria suffer a decrease. Despite the notable progress of the Alpine road network (tunnels, motorways), the influx of tourists remained for a long time at 10 million guests, reaching 16 million with the recovery of the European economy in the second half of the 1980s.
