Sunday 12th September 2021
“Corona failure will be made up for”
Insurance chief expects pension plus
Because the amount of pensions is linked to wages, Germany’s seniors go away empty-handed during the Corona crisis. The President of the German Pension Insurance is expecting a decent increase in retirement benefits in 2022. For self-employed persons, it requires compulsory insurance.
Pensioners in Germany can expect a significant increase in their retirement benefits next year. It can be assumed that the pandemic-related pension increase in 2021 “will be made up to a certain extent in the coming year and that pensioners will get a decent increase in 2022,” said the President of the German Pension Insurance Association, Gundula Roßbach, the newspapers of the Funke media group.
How much more it will be, however, will not be known until next spring, said Roßbach, “because we have to look at wage developments throughout 2021”. For example, it is currently not possible to estimate how the fourth corona wave will affect the economy and the labor market, “therefore, specific predictions are dubious at this point in time”.
The corona crisis led to a massive economic slump last year. Since pension increases are calculated on the basis of the wage development in the previous year, the West German retirees had to accept a zero round this year. In the east there was only a mini increase of 0.72 percent.
Pension funds got through the crisis stable
As for the income situation of the statutory pension insurance during the pandemic, Roßbach expressed overall satisfaction with the newspapers. The head of the authorities said that “also as far as the income is concerned, has so far been able to get through the crisis in a stable manner”. One reason for this is that the pension insurance in the pandemic also receives pension contribution payments on short-time work benefits, unemployment benefits and sickness benefits.
Rossbach wrote compulsory insurance for the self-employed on the agenda of the new federal government. Rossbach told the Funke newspapers that compulsory pension insurance was “certainly right” for this group. Politicians should “have this project on the agenda in the next legislative period”.
To justify this, Roßbach said that the pension insurance had long indicated the higher risk of poverty of the self-employed in retirement age. The proportion of self-employed who are dependent on basic security in old age “is significantly higher than that of dependent employees,” emphasized the head of the authorities. Above all, many so-called solo self-employed are affected. “Especially with them, too, we as a society have to think about what a good old-age security scheme can look like. Because in many cases this group only has basic security, which is financed by the community through taxes,” Roßbach emphasized in an interview with the newspapers.
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