Wer trägt die Steuerlast? Verteilungswirkungen des deutschen Steuer- und Transfersystems

On the basis of a representative and integrated database from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) of DIW Berlin, the official wage and income tax statistics and the Income and Consumption Sample (EVS) of the Federal Statistical Office as well as the microsimulation model STSM, the tax burden on private households in Germany is analysed for the period from 1998 to 2015. By integrating income tax statistics, profit and capital income in particular are recorded much better than in previous analyses with household data. The analysis of the tax burden specifically deals with the relative importance of labour income and consumption as well as capital income and discusses the distributional effects of different incidence assumptions. In the period 1998-2015, the burden on household income from the sharp rise in consumption taxes exceeded the relief effects of the reduction in income tax, and poorer households, measured in terms of current income, were overall much more burdened by the tax reforms than households with higher incomes. This is reinforced by the regressiveness of social contributions, which also increased over the period.