(Reforms; 04-03; p.4)
The fundamentals of decisions
It is a characteristic of German discussions
that sometimes the distributional effects of the measures suggested
are mentioned, whereas the underlying social structure is not.
- One may see this as another indication of German dispute-aversion
that has been furthered also by economic developments in the FRG:
until the 1980s there were nothing but profits to distribute without
evening out social imbalance.
The sociologist Rainer Geißler characterises
these basic facts: "Net real income of employees which
excludes the effects of inflation, taxes and social insurance
rose between 1950 and 1979 by the factor 3,2 ... . Since 1980
there were slight increases only in three years - 1987, 1988 and
1990 -, in total about 6 %. Real disposable income per capita
of Western Germans reached its historic high in 1991 and amounted
... to 12844 € [Euro] ... . Between 1991 and 1994 it sank about
8 % and rose until 1998 only slightly. In this backward trend
especially the burden of German unification finds its expression."
(Geißler, R: Die Sozialstruktur Deutschlands. 3rd fundamentally
rev. ed. Bonn and Wiesbaden 2002, p. 83; translation, original
in German.)
In the GDR, incomes developed historically conditioned
differently; all the same, meanwhile one can state a widespread
trend towards equalisation even if there is still some lagging
behind: Geißler rates this difference at 25 % on average (as shown
below in fig. 4.7 of ibid., p. 95). (read
on here)