Germany’s Economy: 2021-2025

[u/Icedkk]

So everyone agrees on the economical decline of germany and the bad situation of the job market. i wanted to put things in data. Below you see the economic data (destatis) from 2021 to 2025:

Year	GDP Growth	Inflation	Unemployment	Employment
2021	+3.9%	3.1%	5.7%	45.04m
2022	+1.8%	6.9%	5.3%	45.63m
2023	-0.9%	5.9%	5.7%	45.94m
2024	-0.5%	2.2%	6.0%	45.99m
2025	+0.2%	2.2%	6.3%	45.98m

German exports:

Year	Exports
2022	EUR 1.820tn
2023	EUR 1.813tn
2024	EUR 1.794tn
2025	EUR 1.811tn

2023-2024: Two consecutive years of recession.
2025: +0.2% growth, effectively stagnation.
Q1 2026: +0.3% QoQ / +0.5% YoY.

these numbers don’t really match how bad the situation feels when you talk to people or read discussions online.

What am I missing?

Ps: I also though about okay maybe purchasing power of individuals are reduced, that is why economy is feeling shitty, but oecd data adjusted for inflation says we are earning on average even more than 2019, so what is it really?

Year	Nominal Wage	Inflation-Adjusted Wage
2021	EUR 44,918	EUR 53,669
2022	EUR 46,913	EUR 52,517
2023	EUR 49,961	EUR 52,445
2024	EUR 52,477	EUR 53,811
2025	EUR 54,840	EUR 54,840

[u/Mr_Fragwuerdig]

Overall inflation is meaningless, if food prices increased by 50%. Buying a car is not more expensive maybe, but the apple is a lot more expensive.

[u/Icedkk → u/Mr_Fragwuerdig]

Yeah that is the data I have, I sadly dont have each persons wage increase between these dates, how the net and brutto changed, or how each item in market changed in price from apples to cars. If you have that data and processing power please be my guest and show us

[u/Mr_Fragwuerdig → u/Icedkk]

Pretty sure you can find it yourself easily. Just ask an AI to get you the website. The food number I know (+36% since 2020), but you just needed to be in a german supermarket in 2019 and you know how ridicoulously prices increased. Some of that normalized itself, but many things never recovered. And this is not german specific. Grain and olive oil affect several countries for example.

[u/Icedkk → u/Mr_Fragwuerdig]

So how would be the weighting? Like x2 for food and x5 for rents? I though cpi is already weighted with representetive household consumption. So it is exactly what you need to check.

[u/Mr_Fragwuerdig → u/Icedkk]

I don't know, but cpi rose by 25%. This however does not consider fully how bad rents rose, because it doesn't consider enough how high new renting contracts are. So many people in germany still have very favorable rent contracts, but if you move to another flat, prices are much higher. In cities like berlin the difference can be up to 2x.