Post by 1949 on Dec 22, 2004 17:30:13 GMT -5
Germany: report bares widening gap between rich and poor
SPD-Greens preside over social polarisation
By Dietmar Henning
21 December 2004
The gulf between rich and poor in Germany has continued to grow since the SPD (German Social Democratic Party)-Green Party government took office six years ago. Contrary to all their election promises, they have presided over an unrestrained redistribution of wealth in favour of the wealthy and at the expense of the broad majority of society.
Under the headline “Whoever has, will receive more,” the magazine Der Spiegel published an article at the end of November disclosing initial figures from the report by the federal government on “living conditions in Germany.” The figures were drawn from the second report on wealth and poverty, which has yet to be published by the government. The first report of 2001 had already confirmed the increasing social polarisation in Germany.
Der Spiegel quotes from the first part of the report: “Social inequality is a fact and in some areas has increased over the past few years.” Currently, every seventh of Germany’s total of 29 million households lives in poverty. The proportion of households afflicted by poverty—based on the European Union (EU) standard—rose from 12.1 percent in 1998 to 13.5 percent today. The EU regards households as poor when they receive less than 60 percent of the average net income. Government subsidies are included in this figure. For a family of four, according to Der Spiegel, this sum amounts to 1,550 euros per month.
Increasing poverty is inevitably accompanied by the growth of private indebtedness. The number of insolvent households in Germany increased by 13 percent to a total of 3.13 million in 2002. The federal ministry for families defines insolvency as follows: “A private household is insolvent when its income, over a prolonged period after the deduction of cost-of-living expenses and despite a reduction of its standard of living, is not sufficient for debt repayment within the prescribed period.”
The unpublished report states that a third of all poor households are not able to free themselves from a difficult financial situation even after a period of years. Rising unemployment in particular is responsible for condemning increasing numbers of people to social marginalisation.
Children and young people in poverty
Children and young people under 18 are especially affected when they live in a household with only one parent (usually a mother) or in families with several brothers and sisters. More than 40 percent of one-parent families live in poverty. According to the federal government report, children and young people in households dependent upon social security are by far the largest group affected, and more than 1 million children are dependent on state aid.
It is almost impossible for children and young people to escape from the vicious cycle of poverty in Germany. Good educational qualifications are the prerequisite for a job with an adequate wage later in life. The attainment of such qualifications, however, is made more difficult or even impossible for children from poor families. Figures in the poverty report confirm this. “The chances for a child from a parents’ house with an elevated social status to receive a recommendation for Gymnasium education [after the fourth year of secondary school], are approximately 2.7 times as high as the chances for the child from a skilled worker’s household.” This inequality increases once again up to the point of graduation. Children with wealthy parents have a 7.4 times greater chance than children from a poor household of going to university.
The figures published recently from the so-called Pisa report on educational standards demonstrate that the gap between high- and low-performing pupils has once again increased in Germany. Klaus Klemm, professor of educational science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, explained in an initial statement on the new Pisa report that many of its findings still require closer investigation. “What is clear, however, is that the persistently low performance level of secondary school pupils is bound up with the social selectivity of German schools,” Klemm states. “As was the case with the first Pisa study, the report reveals a close relationship between the choice of school and social origin, even when pupils with the same cognitive abilities but different social origin are compared with one another.”
Pupils from immigrant families are disproportionately affected by the social selection that takes place in the German education system. They end up mainly in secondary schools, and such schools, according to Klemm, “develop into preparatory schools for unemployment and lack of training.”
Increasing wealth at the top
Not everyone is affected by growing poverty. Those at the top of the income pyramid have registered a further increase in their wealth.
The wealth of the richest layers in Germany now amounts to 5 trillion euros, according to the authors of the report. Irrespective of the fact that a large proportion of private financial resources had been neglected in the last poverty report of 2001, the figure quoted in the latest report represents an increase of 17 percent compared to when the SPD and the Green Party first took office. In purely statistical terms, each household has an income of more than 133,000 euros. Of course, this fortune is unequally distributed. A tenth of households possess 47 percent of the wealth. In 1998, these households possessed “just” 45 percent of the smaller total sum of assets.
In addition, wealth is passed from one generation of the wealthy to the next. This was demonstrated by the German Institute for Economic Research in a 2003 study titled “Representative analysis of the living conditions of wealthier households”: “Households with high incomes not only receive inheritances or donations more frequently, they also inherit on average higher sums.”
The German TV magazine Monitor, which also has had access to the wealth and poverty report, reported that in 1997 there were 510,000 wealthy citizens in Germany with a fortune of more than a million euros. Five years later, under the SPD-Green Federal Government, this number had increased to 775,000. In the Monitor broadcast, professor Dieter Eissel, an author of the report, declared: “In 1998 we already had a substantial difference between poor and rich. However, one must state that this difference between rich and poor has increased under this government. That is first of all because of a tax policy that favours the wealthy, those with fortunes and profit earners, while the burden for consumers and tax payers has remained the same or even increased.”
SPD-Greens preside over social polarisation
By Dietmar Henning
21 December 2004
The gulf between rich and poor in Germany has continued to grow since the SPD (German Social Democratic Party)-Green Party government took office six years ago. Contrary to all their election promises, they have presided over an unrestrained redistribution of wealth in favour of the wealthy and at the expense of the broad majority of society.
Under the headline “Whoever has, will receive more,” the magazine Der Spiegel published an article at the end of November disclosing initial figures from the report by the federal government on “living conditions in Germany.” The figures were drawn from the second report on wealth and poverty, which has yet to be published by the government. The first report of 2001 had already confirmed the increasing social polarisation in Germany.
Der Spiegel quotes from the first part of the report: “Social inequality is a fact and in some areas has increased over the past few years.” Currently, every seventh of Germany’s total of 29 million households lives in poverty. The proportion of households afflicted by poverty—based on the European Union (EU) standard—rose from 12.1 percent in 1998 to 13.5 percent today. The EU regards households as poor when they receive less than 60 percent of the average net income. Government subsidies are included in this figure. For a family of four, according to Der Spiegel, this sum amounts to 1,550 euros per month.
Increasing poverty is inevitably accompanied by the growth of private indebtedness. The number of insolvent households in Germany increased by 13 percent to a total of 3.13 million in 2002. The federal ministry for families defines insolvency as follows: “A private household is insolvent when its income, over a prolonged period after the deduction of cost-of-living expenses and despite a reduction of its standard of living, is not sufficient for debt repayment within the prescribed period.”
The unpublished report states that a third of all poor households are not able to free themselves from a difficult financial situation even after a period of years. Rising unemployment in particular is responsible for condemning increasing numbers of people to social marginalisation.
Children and young people in poverty
Children and young people under 18 are especially affected when they live in a household with only one parent (usually a mother) or in families with several brothers and sisters. More than 40 percent of one-parent families live in poverty. According to the federal government report, children and young people in households dependent upon social security are by far the largest group affected, and more than 1 million children are dependent on state aid.
It is almost impossible for children and young people to escape from the vicious cycle of poverty in Germany. Good educational qualifications are the prerequisite for a job with an adequate wage later in life. The attainment of such qualifications, however, is made more difficult or even impossible for children from poor families. Figures in the poverty report confirm this. “The chances for a child from a parents’ house with an elevated social status to receive a recommendation for Gymnasium education [after the fourth year of secondary school], are approximately 2.7 times as high as the chances for the child from a skilled worker’s household.” This inequality increases once again up to the point of graduation. Children with wealthy parents have a 7.4 times greater chance than children from a poor household of going to university.
The figures published recently from the so-called Pisa report on educational standards demonstrate that the gap between high- and low-performing pupils has once again increased in Germany. Klaus Klemm, professor of educational science at the University of Duisburg-Essen, explained in an initial statement on the new Pisa report that many of its findings still require closer investigation. “What is clear, however, is that the persistently low performance level of secondary school pupils is bound up with the social selectivity of German schools,” Klemm states. “As was the case with the first Pisa study, the report reveals a close relationship between the choice of school and social origin, even when pupils with the same cognitive abilities but different social origin are compared with one another.”
Pupils from immigrant families are disproportionately affected by the social selection that takes place in the German education system. They end up mainly in secondary schools, and such schools, according to Klemm, “develop into preparatory schools for unemployment and lack of training.”
Increasing wealth at the top
Not everyone is affected by growing poverty. Those at the top of the income pyramid have registered a further increase in their wealth.
The wealth of the richest layers in Germany now amounts to 5 trillion euros, according to the authors of the report. Irrespective of the fact that a large proportion of private financial resources had been neglected in the last poverty report of 2001, the figure quoted in the latest report represents an increase of 17 percent compared to when the SPD and the Green Party first took office. In purely statistical terms, each household has an income of more than 133,000 euros. Of course, this fortune is unequally distributed. A tenth of households possess 47 percent of the wealth. In 1998, these households possessed “just” 45 percent of the smaller total sum of assets.
In addition, wealth is passed from one generation of the wealthy to the next. This was demonstrated by the German Institute for Economic Research in a 2003 study titled “Representative analysis of the living conditions of wealthier households”: “Households with high incomes not only receive inheritances or donations more frequently, they also inherit on average higher sums.”
The German TV magazine Monitor, which also has had access to the wealth and poverty report, reported that in 1997 there were 510,000 wealthy citizens in Germany with a fortune of more than a million euros. Five years later, under the SPD-Green Federal Government, this number had increased to 775,000. In the Monitor broadcast, professor Dieter Eissel, an author of the report, declared: “In 1998 we already had a substantial difference between poor and rich. However, one must state that this difference between rich and poor has increased under this government. That is first of all because of a tax policy that favours the wealthy, those with fortunes and profit earners, while the burden for consumers and tax payers has remained the same or even increased.”