January 18, 2024 at 5:53 pm
Photo: Pixabay/geralt
For decades, Germany was the so-called heart of Europe and one of the richest countries in the EU. Despite this, new financial data shows that Germans have surprisingly little wealth, while Eastern and Southern Europeans have surprisingly much more, Focus reports. According to some experts, the UN and EU refugee policy is behind Germany’s impoverishment.
The latest Bundesbank study sums it up Europe data on the country’s wealth from 2021. According to it, the average net worth of a German family is 106,600 euros. Citizens of just five EU member states are less wealthy.
In Luxembourg, however, the average (median) family has 734,745 euros. But the median in Slovakia is also higher than in Germany, 116,244 euros. Slovenia and Italy have on average almost one and a half times more families (median) and Spain almost double that of Germany.
The real wealth of the Germans is even less
But even this bleak picture of the German financial landscape is still imperfect, according to the Bundesbank. Indeed, German society is sharply divided between the rich, who own real estate or at least their own home, and the near-rich.
When you consider the half of German residents living in a rented apartment, the average household net worth of just under 16,000 euros is almost negligible compared to the EU. In the period after 2021, not covered by the study, inflation and rising rents would probably even reduce the wealth of this segment of the population.
There are many reasons for the relative lack of wealth of Germans
It is relatively difficult to determine why Europe’s largest economy has such a poor population, he writes Bloomberg. The obvious reason for the low average values is the extremely unequal distribution of wealth in Germany.
Between 2010 and 2019 alone, the share of the poorest in Germany – those with an average income of less than 50% – increased by around 40%. A quarter of Berlin’s children now live in poverty.
Germans save, Eastern and Southern Europeans speculate and invest
At the same time, Germans are historically risk averse and prefer to save rather than buy real estate or invest their savings in stocks. In many southern and eastern European countries, citizens are much more open to financial speculation.
As recent decades have brought with them one of the longest booms in the history of North American and European capital markets and a long phase of negative interest rates, Germans are now disproportionately poorer than usual.
Ultimately, the overall prosperity of the German economy also paradoxically means that citizens have little reason to take risks and increase their private wealth. Bloomberg reports that in Germany you can live well with little money and relatively little work. Social security, high taxes and good public infrastructure favored the result that can now be seen in the statistics.
Source: focus.de
Translated by Hando Tõnumaa
2024-01-18 15:53:38
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