Income Polarisation, Rising Mobility Costs and Green Transport: Contradictory Developments in Germany’s Automotive Market

Abstract

In the last 10 years, the gap between the rich and the poor in Germany has widened. Incomes polarise to the margins, and the middle-income group gets smaller. Increasing income inequality has important influence on the population’s real and perceived quality of life and participation in society at large. Since 2001, at the mid-term of each electoral period, the German government issues a report on the living conditions of the poor and rich. The forth and most recent report, issued in January 2013, confirmed existing trends: a wider distribution of incomes among the rich and the poor; increasing low-income jobs, as more than 4 million people earn less than 7 Euro pre-tax an hour; a higher risk of poverty in general. Poor people thus tend to remain in the weakest income group (Bundesregierung, 2013). This alarming finding has been a highly political issue, as the government tried to conceal its significance in an earlier version of the report, published in 2012 (Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 28 November 2012).