Measured by the ratio of total wealth to total income, inequality in Germany is one of the highest among Western industrialized countries. In their latest contribution to the Wirtschaftsdienst, inequality researchers Charlotte Bartels and Theresa Neef explain that this is primarily due to the rise in real estate and land prices in the 2000s rather than growing ownership or savings rates. At the same time the Gini of income inequality has remained relatively stable since 2005. IDW researchers, Diermaier and Niehues suggest that this finding, along with successes in labor market participation among migrants, should be used by the media and politicians to counteract the population's fears of social decline. In their contribution, they examine the relationship between wealth inequality and votes for right-wing radical parties in the European elections and find no statistically significant connection. However, while AfD supporters disproportionately agree with the statement that wealth in Germany is not fairly distributed, they also support the reduction of state redistribution measures more strongly than supporters of all other parties.

By looking at inequality from a regional and green transition perspective, Jens Südekum and Daniel Posch argue that an update of German regional policy is needed. In a new empirical analysis, the authors show that the decoupling of employment and CO2 emissions in Germany has so far been hardly achieved. In some counties, the service sector has offset job losses from deindustrialization, and new processes have reduced emissions in the production of pharmaceutical and chemical products. However, in other regions and sectors, such as shipping and aviation, as well as paper and metal production, emission intensity has tended to increase over the last twenty years. Most importantly, new empirical results indicate a positive correlation between the density of climate-damaging jobs in a given electoral district and the increase in AfD votes in the last two federal elections. Against this background, it is urgently necessary to fundamentally reform the funding structure in regional policy and better align it with the needs of the economic and employment transition.