General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
Size of cash and near-cash transfer programmes (unemployment benefits, means-tested assistance, universal child benefits). Architecturally distinct from forced-saving schemes — see condition welfare_architecture.
Ease of hiring/firing, collective-bargaining scope, minimum wage rigidity, temporary/permanent contract regulation.
Emergency invocation of the debt-brake exception clause (Art. 115 Abs. 2 GG, 'außergewöhnliche Notsituation') to finance ~EUR 470bn in federal support across 2020-2021: Nachtragshaushalte March and July 2020, the EUR 600bn Wirtschaftsstabilisierungsfonds guarantees, expanded Kurzarbeitergeld (short-time work) reaching ~6 million workers at peak, Überbrückungshilfen for businesses, and VAT rate cut (July-December 2020). Also participated in the EU Next Generation EU / SURE joint- borrowing framework — the precedent-setting shared-debt instrument Merkel had previously opposed. Final major fiscal intervention of the Merkel era; set the template the Ampel extended after 2022.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.