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Pensioners in Havelberg (2015): A quarter of the old-age poor do not receive the basic pension
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Jens Wolf / zb / dpa
According to an expert analysis, the basic pension introduced by the grand coalition at the beginning of the year is socially unbalanced: many poor people go empty-handed, but many wealthy retirees benefit.
According to a study by the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy (MPISOC), many poor pensioners in particular are not entitled to the basic pension because they lack contribution years.
On the other hand, many wealthy people have claims whose assets are not taken into account - for example their own home or life insurance.
"The basic pension creates new injustices in two ways," criticizes pension expert Axel Börsch-Supan, who heads the "Center for the Economics of Aging" at the Munich research institute.
According to this, just under a quarter of pensioners classified as poor are not entitled to the basic pension.
On the other hand, according to the study, many people who are by no means poor can receive a basic pension: Almost 70 percent of the recipients would therefore not be entitled to the basic pension if their own assets were taken into account.
A good fifth of those entitled therefore belong to the richer half of German pensioners.
According to the study, almost ten percent of basic pension recipients are so wealthy that their income doubles the median value - in other words, the income threshold exactly in the middle that separates the richer from the poorer half.
The basic pension has officially been in place since January 1st.
Around 1.3 million people can count on the supplement, 70 percent of them women.
However, with a delay: The pension insurance has announced that the payment cannot start at the beginning of the year due to the complexity of the calculation and the data comparison with the tax offices.
The recipients must have paid in contributions for at least 33 years - one reason why, according to the analysis by the Max Planck scientists, so many women fall out.
Börsch-Supan and the authors of the study estimated the income levels of German retirees on the basis of a study called SHARE-RV on the European population of retirement age, in which around 140,000 people aged 50 or older from 28 European countries and Israel have been surveyed since 2004 were.
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