Ein einheitliches Rentensystem für Ost- und Westdeutschland: Simulationsrechnungen zum Reformvorschlag des Sachverständigenrates

In its annual report 2008/2009, the Council of Economic Advisors came forward with a proposal how to unify the German pension system. In this paper, we quantify the effects of this proposal. We show that the direction and size of the effects largely depend on the development of future wages. In the most realistic case we assume that the average wages in East Germany remain a constant fraction of the average wage in the West over time. In this case, the Council's proposal only weakly affects the size of pensions in East and West Germany. Thus, the effect on the contribution rate to the pension system is also weak. On the contrary, if average wages in East and West fully converge in the future, this reform would lead to redistribution from pensioners in the East to pensioners in the West. In the most unrealistic case, where average wages in East and West Germany continue to diverge in the future, pensioners in both East and West Germany would be worse off with the reform. However, contribution rates to the pension system would be relatively lower, leading to redistribution from the old to the young. Copyright 2010 die Autoren Journal compilation 2010, Verein für Socialpolitik und Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Germany : the public-private dichotomy in the Bismarckian welfare regime

The German welfare state has undergone fundamental reforms over the past three decades. Since the early 1980s, various governments changed the programmatic contours of German social policies. Beyond the question of how various national governments could push through these reforms under the conditions of federalism, divided government ( jointdecision trap ; Scharpf 1988, 2006), corporatism and increasing party competition, this chapter focuses on the changing contours of the public-private mix in health and pension policies. The argument of this chapter is that privatization, understood as a risk shift (Hacker 2004, 2006), has taken place in the German welfare state. However, because this welfare state was, and largely remains, a highly interwoven social insurance state in which the state and social partners (for example, labor and business organizations) coincidentally finance and regulate important welfare programs, these reforms do not imply that the federal government lost its prominent role in social policy. Rather, the national government still strongly regulates benefits, contributions, and other programmatic features of public and private social policies