Who Bears the Tax Burden in Germany? Tax Structure Slightly Progressive

Stefan Bach (), Martin Beznoska and Viktor Steiner

DIW Economic Bulletin, 2016, vol. 6, issue 51/52, 601-608

Abstract: A comprehensive, microdata-based analysis of the German tax system's distributional effects in 2015 shows that the total tax burden from direct and indirect taxes is slightly progressive on higher income, but regressive in the lower deciles. Income and corporate taxes are distinctly progressive. They impose hardly any burden on lower- and middle-income households, but the average burden significantly increases for higher incomes. On the other hand, the indirect taxes that generate almost half of Germany’s tax revenues have a highly regressive effect. In relation to income, they burden low earners more heavily than high-income households. When some of the social security contribution is assigned to the tax system, the total tax burden on middle income groups is not much lower than that on the very wealthy, whose corporate and investment income are not subject to a progressive income tax.

JEL-codes: D31 H22 H24 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_ ... n_bull_2016-51-1.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwdeb:2016-51-1

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in DIW Economic Bulletin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().