Documents Kyzyma, Iryna 6 results

"Wohlstand für alle“ – dieses Versprechen verbinden viele mit der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft. Vor dem Hintergrund der aktuell anhaltend hohen Einkommens- und Vermögensungleichheit werden in der öffentlichen Debatte jedoch immer häufiger Zweifel an der Fähigkeit der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft laut, Wirtschaftswachstum mit sozialer Teilhabe zu kombinieren.

Die Diskussionsbeiträge hierzu sind vielfältig und weit davon entfernt, ein einheitliches Bild zu zeichnen. Einerseits wird auf die sinkende bzw. stagnierende Reallohnentwicklung der unteren Einkommensklassen und das damit verbundene Schrumpfen der Mittelklasse in den vergangenen 30 Jahren hingewiesen. Andererseits wird vielfach der Standpunkt vertreten, dass durch zusätzliche Beschäftigungsmöglichkeiten im unteren Einkommenssektor die Möglichkeit zu sozialem Aufstieg überhaupt erst eröffnet wird. Zudem verteile das deutsche Steuer- und Transfersystem im internationalen Vergleich bereits jetzt überdurchschnittlich viel um.

Doch wie stellt sich die langfristige Entwicklung der Sozialen Marktwirtschaft ab Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland mit Blick auf die wirtschaftliche Dynamik sowie ihre Inklusivität dar?

Der vorliegende Policy Brief fasst die wesentlichen Ergebnisse der Studie „‚Wohlstand für alle‘: Wie inklusiv ist die Soziale Marktwirtschaft?“ des Zentrums für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW) im Auftrag der Bertelsmann Stiftung zusammen. Diese geht über die vorherrschenden Kurzfristanalysen hinaus und ermöglicht eine fundiertere Einschätzung der gegenwärtigen Lage in der Bundesrepublik"

"The COVID‐19 emergency has had a dramatic impact on market incomes and income‐support policies. The lack of timely available data constrains the estimation of the scale and direction of recent changes in the income distribution, which in turn constrains policymakers seeking to monitor such developments. We overcome the lack of data by proposing a dynamic calibrated microsimulation approach to generate counterfactual income distributions as a function of more timely external data than are available in dated income surveys. We combine nowcasting methods using publicly available data and a household income generation model to perform the first calibrated simulation based upon actual data, aiming to assess the distributional implications of the COVID‐19 crisis in Ireland. Overall, we find that the crisis had an equalizing real‐time effect for both gross and disposable incomes, notwithstanding the significant hardship experienced by many households."

"This paper looks at the social policy responses to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis and assesses their impact on preserving living standards in Ireland. The former crisis was in an environment pressured to balance budgets with a greater focus on cost reduction. In contrast, during the COVID-19 crisis, there was a greater focus on mitigating the impact on household incomes largely funded by debt. Another innovation in the current crisis were the joint public and private responses through social partnership. Using the microsimulation methodology, we find a stronger social policy response during the COVID-19 crisis than during the financial crisis. However, as the impact of the COVID-19 crisis was deeper and quicker, family support was not as strong as there were more individuals out of work. The contribution of the private support based on social partnership, however, was stronger. As a result, those on lower incomes ended up with higher disposable incomes at the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, albeit with policy learning, this fell over the first wave of the pandemic. We conclude by reporting a positive impact on trust in public institutions during the COVID-19 crisis as opposed to a decline during the financial crisis."

"We evaluate the COVID-19 resilience of a Continental welfare regime by nowcasting the implications of the shock and its associated policy responses on the distribution of household incomes over the whole of 2020. Our approach relies on a dynamic microsimulation modelling that combines a household income generation model estimated on the latest EU-SILC wave with novel nowcasting techniques to calibrate the simulations using external macro controls which reflect the macroeconomic climate during the crisis. We focus on Luxembourg, a country that introduced minor tweaks to the existing tax-benefit system, which has a strong social insurance focus that gave certainty during the crisis. We find the system was well-equipped ahead of the crisis to cushion household incomes against job losses. The income-support policy changes were effective in cushioning household incomes and mitigating an increase in income inequality, allowing average household disposable income and inequality levels to bounce back to pre-crisis levels in the last quarter of 2020. The share of labour incomes dropped, but was compensated by an increase in benefits, reflecting the cushioning effect of the transfer system. Overall market incomes dropped and became more unequal. Their disequalizing evolution was matched by an increase in redistribution, driven by an increase in the generosity of benefits and larger access to benefits. The nowcasting model is a “near” real-time analysis and decision support tool to monitor the recovery, scalable to other countries with high applicability for policymakers."

"This paper disentangles the distributional and welfare impact of price changes since the start of the cost of living crisis for a subset of European countries with different welfare regimes and price changes. It decomposes the impact of inflation and measures welfare changes using the compensating variation and equivalent incomes in a cross-national comparative perspective. The impact of inflation depends on good-specific price increases and budget shares. Budget shares for necessities (e.g. food, domestic fuel, electricity) are higher in poorer countries and for poorer people. Higher price growth in these necessities has resulted in higher inflation in poorer countries. Counter to the media narrative, the distributional impact is less substantial than expected. A significant cross-country variability exists, however, in inflation levels, composition and relative rates across the distribution. Similar levels of inflation regressivity result from different interplays between the level and disproportionality of inflation along the income distribution. We quantify the compensating variation of inflation with a relatively small behavioural component due to the preponderance of necessities among the goods with high price changes. An important factor concerning the potential impact on households is the savings rate. Households with already low savings are disproportionally feeling the impact on their expenditure."

"Using microsimulation tools, we explore the social policy responses to the Great Recession and the COVID-19 crisis, and their impact on preserving living standards in Ireland. During the Great Recession, the focus was on cost reduction. By contrast, during the COVID-19 crisis, the focus was on mitigating the impact on household incomes. In addition, an innovation in joint public and private responses emerged through social partnership. We find a stronger policy response during the COVID-19 crisis than the Great Recession. The COVID-19 crisis was more rapid, leaving more individuals out of work, thus family support was weaker. This was compensated by stronger private support through social partnership. Consequently, those with lower incomes had larger disposable incomes at the onset of the crisis; an effect that reduced with policy learning. We find increasing trust in public institutions during the COVID-19 crisis as opposed to a decline during the Great Recession."