The engine of Europe, Germany expanded its economy to $3.3 trillion in 2010, according to the . Its national statistics office reported growth of 3.6 percent over the year, the fastest rate since reunification in 1990, . The world's second-largest exporter after China boosted exports by 14.3 percent thanks in part to growing domestic demand.
"Germans have looked around lately to find they have the preeminent world-class export economy in Europe. No one else comes close," the Monitor's Europe bureau chief Robert Marquand reported in the January cover story "Germany 鈥� the new mini-superpower."
Germany has built its economy around demand from rapidly growing developing nations. Forty percent of Germany's exports now go to the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China). "The Germans took seriously the idea that global competition will come from the BRICs, and they set about engineering a response," a Western diplomat recently told the Monitor. "They started to make things; that's what they do."
