Inequality Trends for Germany in the Last Two Decades: A Tale of Two Countries
Inhalt
In this paper we …rst document inequality trends in wages, hours
worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth for Germany from the
last twenty years. We generally …nd that inequality was relatively
stable inWest Germany until the German uni…cation (which happened
politically in 1990 and in our data in 1991), and then trended upwards
for wages and market incomes, especially after about 1998. Disposable
income and consumption, on the other hand, display only a modest
increase in inequality over the same period. These trends occured
against the backdrop of lower trend growth of earnings, incomes and
consumption in the 1990s relative to the 1980s. In the second part of
the paper we further analyze the di¤erences between East and West
Germans in terms of the evolution of levels and inequality of wages,
income, and consumption.
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