Wealth

In Germany wealth is highly concentrated: as a rule, the more educated people are, the more they can save. Compared with their European neighbours, Germans have very little put away for a rainy day.

Michael Voigtländer ·
IW-Kurzbericht ·
4 Nov 2016

A high financial burden for German home buyers

Home buyers in Germany not only have to pay high down payments for financing their property, but they also have to pay high transaction costs. Besides the transaction tax, also notary fees and the entry in the land register sum up to a considerable amount. The cases of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom illustrate that high transaction costs are not a necessity.

Michael Voigtländer ·
IW-Kurzbericht ·
4 Nov 2016

A high financial burden for German home buyers

Income Inequality ·
IW News ·
8 Sep 2015

Apples, Oranges, Facts

Analyses of income distribution are currently high on the agenda. Quite often the results of different studies are named in the same breath or mixed in media reports. Though it is rather difficult to reconcile the different findings without considerable explanation. Sometimes the results are even contradictory.

According to the European Central Bank, Germans’ total wealth amounts to some 8 billion euros, approximately three times the country’s annual economic output. This wealth consists of real estate, shares, cars, works of art and, of course, money slumbering in bank accounts and under pillows. After accounting for debt, the average German citizen has assets of 95,700 euros at their disposal. A rather different conclusion is reached by lining up everyone in Germany according to the value of their possessions and then identifying the person in the middle; this so-called median value divides the population into two halves, those with more and those with less to their names. In Germany, this median citizen has 25,200 euros at their disposal - only just over a quarter of the average.

Compared with the other Eurozone states the difference between the median and the average in Germany is striking, and indicates that the wealth in this country is distributed relatively unequally. By contrast, wealth in France, Italy and Spain is more evenly spread across the population. Moreover, the wealth of the median French person is more than twice that of the median German. The main reason why Germans fare so badly in this comparison is the low level of property ownership. More than half of personal assets in the Eurozone consist of real estate, a category in which the Germans have little to offer.