Immigrants in the UK and in West Germany – Relative Income Position, Income Portfolio, and Redistribution Effects

Felix Büchel and Joachim Frick
Additional contact information
Felix Büchel: Max Planck Institute for Human Development

No 788, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Based on data from the BHPS and the GSOEP, we analyse the economic performance of various ethnic groups in the UK and West Germany, as well as the effects of income redistribution on these populations. Taking the indigenous population of each country as the reference category, we find that, as a whole, the non-indigenous population in the UK fares much better than the immigrant population in Germany. However, the range of economic performance across different ethnic groups in the UK is much larger than that in Germany. The German corporatist welfare system is characterised by much stronger redistribution effects than the liberal UK one. Consequently, the relatively low-performing immigrant population in Germany profits more from the redistribution system than immigrants with similar socio-economic attributes in the UK.

Keywords: income redistribution; migration policy; immigration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D31 J15 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2003-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-lab and nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Published - published in: Journal of Population Economics, 2004, 17 (3), 553–581

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp788.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Immigrants in the UK and in West Germany –Relative income position, income portfolio, and redistribution effects (2004)
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:iza:izadps:dp788

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().