222 WINFRIED SÜß
qualifi ed employees has more than doubled since 1990. In light of these
circumstances, earned educational qualifi cations no longer guarantee a
secure career with chances for upward mobility. Instead, education has
become an essential prerequisite for employability in a work environment
in which professional qualifi cations need to be renewed at shorter and
shorter intervals. This change has had a mixed eff ect on structures of
inequality. On the one hand, highly qualifi ed, highly driven employees
in the service sector and those in the free professions, in particular, have
been the winners in terms of social inequality since the 1990s. On the
other hand, the wage gap between professions requiring a university ed-
ucation and those that do not has shrunk.
- Since the mid-1990s, the income gap has been widening. The
above-average growth among the highest-earning tenth of the population
between 1998 and 2008, combined with the stagnating position of the
lowest-earning 40 percent of the population, has fed this development.
The unemployed have suff ered in particular because their income situa-
tion worsened in both absolute and relative terms. Other relative losers
were trainees, workers, and blue collar employees. The relative winners
have been retirees, civil servants, well-qualifi ed employees, and the het-
erogeneous group of freelancers and the self-employed. The poverty rate
has moved in a similar direction. In the year before reunifi cation, 11.8
percent of the West German population was considered to be in danger
of becoming poor. Since the turn of the century, this fi gure has climbed
sharply, hitting 15.1 percent in 2011. As a result, income disparity at the
macro level has started to resemble the distribution patterns of the early
1960s, with the notable exception that most of the poor communities
are no longer located in the South as they were in West Germany in the
1950s, but rather in eastern Germany.
This trend is even more evident in the development of inequalities of
wealth. The poorest fourth of the population has suff ered slight losses in
this respect since 1992, while the wealthiest quarter of the population
had made considerable gains until the fi nancial market crisis hit in 2007.
There are clear disparities between east and west as well as between
north and south in terms of wealth. The intergenerational transfer of the
wealth that had been accumulated in the years of prosperity after World
War II has also contributed to the increasing inequality in the distribu-
tion of wealth. This transfer of wealth through inheritance has grown
signifi cantly over the last twenty years. Between 1999 and 2010, more
than three trillion Euros were inherited in Germany, and economists are
predicting an additional wave of inheritances in the coming years. Aca-
demics are more than three times as likely to inherit wealth than workers.
As a result of fewer opportunities to accumulate wealth and the lesser im-