Dramatic inheritance gap between West and East

  • From Sonja Hennen
  • Reading duration 2 min

Germany remains a socially and spatially unequal country - not all regions have benefited equally from the decade of growth. This is shown by the new socio-economic disparities report of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation.

Germany has had a successful decade, with record employment and stable economic growth. However, income and wealth inequality has increased during this period . Despite a well-developed welfare state, Germany is one of the most unequal countries in the industrialised world. This inequality has many dimensions. One dimension is regional inequality.

A more differentiated analysis of regional inequality is provided by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung's Socio-Economic Disparities Report, recently published for the third time. The report's findings suggest that not all regions in Germany have been able to benefit from the growth of the past decade and that political countermeasures are needed to prevent regions from drifting further apart.

The spatial distribution of wealth and poverty remains very uneven. Differences exist not only between regions, but also between individual districts and independent cities. This is particularly true in dynamic cities, where preferred residential areas are increasingly reserved for the very wealthy, while poorer people are often concentrated in neighbourhoods that are neglected in terms of infrastructure and construction. There are also strong differences in inherited and given wealth: between East and West - and especially between the East and the South.

This highly unequal distribution of inherited and gifted wealth threatens to exacerbate individual and spatial inequalities of wealth and poverty, and of social services.

Resilience

Moreover, in the face of today's multiple crises and the associated challenges of transformation, the resilience of individual regions varies widely. The picture is often more nuanced than the public debate suggests. There is no simple urban-rural dichotomy, i.e., cities are not fundamentally well positioned and rural regions are not fundamentally badly positioned. Similarly, the widespread perception that the West is prospering while the East is experiencing widespread structural problems is generally too simplistic. Rather, individual regional innovation poles and resilient rural areas contrast with regions with partial or pronounced adjustment problems.

READ THE REPORT.