How many pensioners in Germany are at risk of poverty? Surprisingly, nobody knew it so well, despite all the heated debates on the subject. Or nobody wanted to know it, because there were only surveys for which one fairly large groups had lumped together without hesitation. Either the total income of all over 64-year-olds in the country was viewed on a flat-rate basis – and then, for 2017 (newer figures do not exist), people came to a risk-of-poverty rate of 14.6 percent. Or one looked – more purposefully – at the pensioners and pensioners. That resulted in a quota of 16 percent.
Both did not seem particularly worrying, as the at-risk-of-poverty rate of the total population – those with less than 60 percent of median income – is 15.8 percent. The 21 million pensioners in this country would therefore not be more threatened by poverty than the average of the population.
Pensioners know the problem as well as not at all
However, the statistics so far are grossly misleading. If you exclude the financially almost invariably well-off pensioners, the rate of pensioners at risk of poverty is much higher. At 19.5 percent, almost every fifth person in German pensioner households is at risk of poverty. The 1.25 million pensioners, in whose households the at-risk-of-poverty rate is almost unchanged at just 0.9 percent over the years, have greatly enhanced the previous series of figures.
A mathematician and a former employee of the Federal Statistical Office recently found this out. „The summary of the poor groups of retirees and retirees since 2010 was a thorn in my side,“ says the Koblenz professor of statistics and empirical social research, Gerd Bosbach. Repeated requests to official statisticians to identify the present material separately from the microcensus have been dismissed with reference to the high cost of such a venture, says Bosbach, who has already published two books on „statistical lies“
Poverty rates underestimated by up to 3.7 percentage points
That there are now more accurate figures on the situation of pensioners, is due to his idea to turn a member of the Bundestag. In the hope that at least one parliamentary party would have to „get this important socio-political size“, the statistician turned to the pension policy spokesman for the left, Matthias Birkwald. The two submitted their application to the responsible State Statistical Office in North Rhine-Westphalia – and received a more differentiated evaluation. However, only for a fee.
But it was worth it. Bosbach and Birkwald call the result appalling. „Poverty rates have been underestimated by up to 3.7 percentage points for years,“ says the left-wing politician. Almost one in five in a pensioner’s household must live either alone by less than 999 euros or two people of less than 1499 euros a month. And the look at the development of the past years let also „for the future imagine evil, if not vigorously countered,“ says Bosbach. In 2007, the at-risk-of-poverty rate for retirees was 14 percent, according to the figures released. In 2011, it was 17 percent, in 2014 it was 19.2 percent.
SPD sees new statistics as evidence of need for ground rent
The responsible for the rent topic SPD parliamentary group Karl Lauterbach described the new evaluation as understandable and „coherent“. The results are „further proof that the basic pension must come,“ he told the Tagesspiegel. Otherwise, you run „looking into a big social problem“.
Birkwald, on the other hand, sees in the pension improvement demanded by the SPD only a „first step“ against old-age poverty. The concept of Social Minister Hubertus Heil was exclusively aimed at getting people with long phases in the low paid sector out of „basic old age security“. The basic security threshold is currently only 796 euros. The left called for a „solidarity minimum pension“, which ensures that at the age of no one less than 1050 euros must live net.
