Volume 61, Issue 2

As a consequence of a ruling of the Federal Labour Court in 2010, the German labour market entered a new regime, allowing multiple unions to operate in the same firm. This alteration has instigated an intense debate about its possible consequences for labour relations. We examine the conceptual and empirical basis for this concern. Our analysis does not lead us to expect an important increase neither in the foundation of occupational unions nor in strike activities. We therefore argue that multi-unionism should be viewed as a natural feature of German industrial relations.

Oliver Arentz and Steffen Roth state that poverty among the elderly is currently an exception in Germany. Nevertheless, it is foreseeable that future pensioners will have less income and assets at their disposal. Reasons are the effects of the demographic change to the pay-as-you-go pension scheme, gaps in employment biographies and low pay employment. With that in mind, they discuss the reform package advocated by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs. Furthermore they derive guidelines for a sustainable reform of the pension schemes. Bert Rürup also argues that poverty in old age is up to now not a relevant social problem in Germany. Nevertheless, there are clear indications that poverty among the elderly will increase in the future due to a bundle of reasons. Because of this there is no silver bullet to solve this problem. In the conception of an adequate strategy to reduce and to prevent a rise of poverty in old age, however, the equivalence principle as the basic principal the German statutory pension scheme has to be questioned critically. Jan Goebel gives an overview of the current development of old-age poverty in Germany and classifies widely discussed concepts for the reform of statutory pension insurance. Although current indicators generally point to an increase in old-age poverty, the empirical data show no growth at present in poverty risk for persons aged 65 and older. However, it is expected that the income position of older people will be worsen due to the declining pension payments of new retirees and the increase in discontinuous employment trajectories as well as the insufficient spread in private old age provision. One of the reforms discussed for preventing rising poverty risks in old age is to consider life expectancy in the pension formula. This appears to be a promising means of reducing inequality within the group of pensioners, he states. The implicit redistribution within the statutory pension system due to the empirically well-known correlation between living standards and life expectancy will decrease, and the equivalence principle can be strengthened.

Abstrac t Poverty among the elderly is currently an exception in Germany. Nevertheless, it is foreseeable that future pensioners will have less income and assets at their disposal. Reasons are the effects of the demographic change to the pay-as-you-go pension scheme, gaps in employment biographies and low pay employment. With that in mind, the reform package advocated by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs is discussed and guidelines for a sustainable reform of the pension schemes are derived.

Poverty in old age is, up to now, not a relevant social problem in Germany. Nevertheless, there are clear indications that poverty among the elderly will increase in the future due to a bundle of reasons. Because of this there is no silver bullet to solve this problem. In the conception of an adequate strategy to reduce and to prevent a rise of poverty in old age, however, the equivalence principle as the basic principal the German statutory pension scheme has to be questioned critically.

The article gives an overview of the current development of old-age pover ty in Germany and classifies widely discussed concepts for the reform of statutory pension insurance. Although current indicators generally point to an increase in old-age poverty, the empirical data show no growth at present in poverty risk for persons aged 65 and older. However, it is expected that the income position of older people will be worsen due to the declining pension payments of new retirees and the increase in discontinuous employment trajectories as well as the insufficient spread in private old age provision. One of the reforms discussed for preventing rising poverty risks in old age is to consider life expectancy in the pension formula. This appears to be a promising means of reducing inequality within the group of pensioners. The implicit redistribution within the statutory pension system due to the empirically well-known correlation between living standards and life expectancy will decrease, and the equivalence principle can be strengthened.

In Germany there exists a political consensus that the economic and fiscal burden of the German reunification should be shared by all three jurisdictional levels of the federal system. According to existing law the burden sharing between the state and local authorities has to be confined to the excess burden which follows from the financing of the German Unity Fund as well as the integration of the eastern German states into the fiscal equalisation system. Thereby, state and local authorities are in conflict with each other regarding an appropriate economic estimation of the excess burden to be caused by the fiscal equalization system. Against this background the paper explains and illustrates the economic concept of burden in terms of opportunity costs. Taking North Rhine-Westphalia as a case study the quantity of the excess burden is empirically estimated for the time period 1995 - 2009 by applying a multivariate data analysis.

In a bold legislative move, in 2009 Germany introduced a fundamental reform of the government borrowing rules which are specified in its constitution. In particular, state governments will be required to provide a balanced budget, abstracting from cyclical fluctuations, starting in the year 2020. A fundamental requirement for the practical implementation of such a rule is the unequivocal decomposition of the actual budget surplus or deficit into derived structural and cyclical components. This paper uses an approach designed to identify cyclical components which tend to average out over time, and calculates the corresponding current structural deficits of all 16 federal states. We find that, at the time being, only two federal states have exerted sufficient effort to reduce their structural deficits to an extent which would be fully compatible with the objective of adhering to the constitutional rules at the end of this decade.