New study on the macroeconomic impact of management consulting

Whether and to what extent management consulting contributes to economic performance has been debated for many years. In a new study, we examine for the first time at the macroeconomic level the relationship between consulting expenditures and key economic indicators in Germany. The results, published in the peer-reviewed European Journal of Management, show that higher spending on consulting is systematically associated with higher gross value added: on average, an additional one million euros in consulting expenditure is linked to an increase of 50 to 60 million euros in value added. Similar relationships are observed for revenue and gross operating surplus. The effects occur primarily with a time lag; dynamic analyses further suggest that consulting often does not operate as a short-term impulse but unfolds its impact through continuous and deliberate processes. An exception may apply to specialized fields such as restructuring and turnaround consulting, which are typically designed to generate immediate effects but account for only a small share of the overall consulting market and therefore remain largely invisible in aggregate data.