High-income singles feel the least impact of rising prices. The main victims are low-income families.
Low-income families continue to suffer most from inflation.
While the shopping baskets for German households have risen by an average of 7.9 percent over the past twelve months, low-income families have even had to pay 8.9 percent more for their typical purchases.
This is the conclusion reached by the Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research (IMK) of the trade union-affiliated Hans Böckler Foundation in its inflation monitor for May published on Monday.
According to the IMK, gas, electricity, heating oil and food are currently the strongest price drivers. These basic necessities would weigh heavily on the spending of poorer households. In contrast, they made up a significantly smaller proportion of the basket of households with high incomes. At just 6.5 percent, singles with high incomes currently have the lowest inflation burden.
Disproportionate load
“The rise in residential energy prices puts a disproportionate burden on households with lower incomes, and the rise in food prices is also having a greater impact,” wrote IMK Director Sebastian Dullien and inflation expert Silke Tober. According to estimates by the IMK, this trend could intensify even further in the coming months, since not all price increases in wholesale household energy have yet been passed on to private households.
This increase is likely to be particularly strong if the Federal Network Agency actually allows suppliers to pass on the increased procurement prices directly to consumers as part of the gas emergency plan, Dullien and Tober emphasized: “In this case, inflation rates in the double-digit range could even be reached in the short term. » This will also hit low-income households particularly drastically.
