FOCUS Online: Ms. Höslinger, you and your Ifo colleague Max Lay are the authors of the study on federal investment behavior. Their results have caused a sensation because they show that the federal government is hardly using the share of the 500 billion euro special fund that has already been spent in 2025 for additional investments. What was actually promised. How do you get to do studies like this at the Ifo Institute? Do you have to shout “here” when the task is handed out?

Emilie Antonia Höslinger: My main focus as an economist at ifo is public finance. I have worked a lot on the federal budget. And I work on our economic forecast together with my colleague Max Lay. It was obvious then. It was an initiative from our boss Clemens Fuest. And it is clear to everyone: As a research institute, we are there to put our finger on the wound. That’s why we developed the concept of the misappropriation quota.

This ratio is intended to show how much money from the newly created debt actually flows into investments. According to their calculation, less than ten percent. When you discovered that, what did you think?

At first we all fell away from the faith ourselves. We then recalculated this several times because none of us wanted to believe that investment activity in the core budget had fallen so sharply. The team was astonished. But even when we did the math, we always came to the same result.

We then thought about how we could communicate this clearly and decided to publish the study this week, which marks the anniversary of the Bundestag’s decision on the special fund.

Your colleagues from IW Cologne come to similar results and have also made their calculations public. Have you agreed?

No, that was complete coincidence. They had the same thought. The numbers are in the same direction, but the fact that they differ a little is due to a slightly different way in which colleagues define investments. I called Cologne and we talked to colleagues.

You are not the only ones who are now criticizing this – I call it sleight of hand. The Federal Audit Office is already on the agenda.

Yes, and so do the economists, just like the Bundesbank. The results all go in the same direction, except that for the first time we have evaluated actual figures and not planned figures.

The Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF) rejects your calculations as incorrect. It argues that you used the traffic light government’s draft budget for 2025, which was never fully funded, as a basis for comparison.

We cannot explain why the BMF claims this. That’s wrong. Our comparison refers to the financial year 2024. We calculated how many additional investments were financed in 2025 compared to 2024. So it is an actual invoice. We also used the final actual figures for 2025.

The Ministry of Finance somewhat apologetically points out that, for procedural reasons, the first funds from the special fund could only be withdrawn in October 2025. Do you accept the argument?

Of course you won’t be able to spend so much money anymore. But it is also clear that since October almost only projects that were previously part of the core budget and were paid for from the special fund have been financed from the special fund. Therefore there were no additional projects. They simply created leeway in the core budget.

The investments of the federal Autobahn GmbH. In 2024 they were 6.6 billion euros, in 2025 the black-red government was only planning 3.6 billion, the rest should come from the special fund. Or the construction cost subsidies for maintaining the railways: in 2024, 7.5 billion euros from the core budget were spent on this. In 2025 the item was completely transferred to the special fund. There are a few such examples.

You really hit a critical point in the government…

It seems so. Due to the lack of additionality, we are depriving the special fund of part of its basis for argumentation.

What do you think – will your study change anything in politics?

Who knows – I don’t want to overestimate our influence. If the federal government sticks to its financial planning, the misappropriation rate could be lower in the future. But there are still huge funding gaps in the budget, so this is very questionable. Real reforms would have to be created.

We will update the misappropriation rate regularly in the future. At the current level of detail, this only happens once a year.

Are you looking forward to it?

As an economist, I have an interest in economic policy and of course I think it’s good when we trigger such discussions, and as a scientist I think it’s important to contribute to such debates with facts.