ifo Institute: 75 Years of Economic Research and Policy Advice

The ifo Institute in Munich turns 75 on January 24. It was born from a merger of two institutes: the Information and Research Center for Economic Observation; and the South German Institute for Economic Research, which Ludwig Erhard had founded in 1946. Today, it enjoys an international reputation for providing excellent economic research and policy advice. “Our research offers policymakers, companies, and the general public reliable analyses and data with which to make informed decisions,” says ifo President Clemens Fuest. “At the outset, our mission was to monitor the economy through our own surveys. Today, tapping into new data sources – such big data – lets us analyze and interpret economic developments more quickly.”

How it all began: On March 1, 1949, a staff of six full-time and 20 part-time employees started work. Early employees included future Bundesbank presidents Helmut Schlesinger and Karl-Otto Pöhl. In the fall of 1949, company surveys were launched as a new method of monitoring the economy and business cycle. To this day, these surveys are still published monthly in the ifo Business Climate. The abbreviation by which the Institute is known today, ifo, stands for “Information und Forschung” – German for “information and research” – and was added to the name only in 1950. In 1993, ifo’s Munich location was joined by a branch in Dresden. The subsidiary CESifo GmbH – a network of over 2,000 economists worldwide, including several Nobel laureates – was founded in 1999. The network celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2024. Since 2002, ifo has been affiliated with Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich. The latest addition to ifo is the Ludwig Erhard ifo Center for Social Market Economy and Institutional Economics in Fürth, which opened in 2022. In addition to the economy, the ifo Institute today addresses current topics such as climate change, geoeconomics, new technologies, and inequality.

The anniversary year for ifo and CESifo is entitled “75 years of ifo – 75 stories.” Throughout the year, numerous activities will tell the story of ifo’s and CESifo’s past, present, and future. They will feature interviews with people from across ifo, explore different places, and showcase ifo development milestones.

Here are some highlights:

February 5: Kickoff of the Munich Economic Debates (MED) series on the topic Future Engine AI – Opportunities and Challenges for Companies and Society with a lecture by Prof. Judith Simon of the German Ethics Council
Event

March 4: MED: “Literature Meets Economics” at the Literaturhaus in Munich with Prof. Clemens Fuest, Theresia Enzensberger, Dr. Philipp Blom

June 27: ifo Anniversary Annual Meeting; panel topic: Social Market Economy 2049 – What Will Become of Our Prosperity and Who Will Share in It? With Prof. Monika Schnitzer (LMU), Dr. Simone Bagel-Trah (Henkel), Judith Gerlach (Bavarian State Government), and Dr. Annette Niederfranke (ILO). With an additional lecture by economic historian Prof. Albrecht Ritschl (LSE)

Article in Journal

Ludwig Erhard and the ifo Institute: In the Service of German Reconstruction

Meinhard Knoche
ifo Institute, Munich, 2019
CESifo Forum 20 (2), 32-46

Article in Journal

Ludwig Erhard, Adolf Weber and the Difficult Birth of the ifo Institute

Meinhard Knoche
ifo Institut, München, 2018
ifo Schnelldienst, 2018, 71, Nr. 13, 14-60

History of CESifo

What does it take to turn a disparate group of economics scholars paying a scholarly visit to Munich, then a backwater in economics, into one of the world’s foremost research networks in the field? Two things: vision, and Hans-Werner Sinn. Long Germany’s most influential economist, HWS built up the network to now more than 2,000 prominent members spread around five continents, created the highly successful CESifo Working Paper series, with now some 11,000 papers published, and turned Munich into a hotbed of economic research, with more than 800 economics events so far. And all of that in barely 25 years.

On our Silver Jubilee, we are proudly looking back and, under the steady hand of Clemens Fuest, HWS's hand-picked successor, also proudly looking ahead, to the next 25 years—and beyond.