The Distribution of Income of Self-employed, Entrepreneurs and Professions as Revealed from Micro Income Tax Statistics in Germany

Merz: The Distribution of Income of Self-employed, Entrepreneurs and Professions

structure. Nevertheless, the further interpretation has to be taken in mind in considering
the number of sample units available.

7.1 The Distribution of Individual Net Income of Single
Professions

The distribution of net income (as individual taxable income minus fixed income,
yearly) now is described with Table 6 by a number of summarizing measures including
quintile shares for all professions and all 14 subgroups.

The overall inequality result of the weighted sample: Professions’ net income mean of
86.929 DM is 2,38 times all working people’s net income mean of 36.492 DM. The
income distribution of all working people (Gini: 0,42520) is more equally distributed
than for professions (Gini: 0,50539). The quintile shares show that the richer 40% of all
working covers almost 69,5% of their total income cake whereas the richer 40% of
professionals earns 76% of their total income. Though there are differences, the overall
inequality differences are not as significant as one might have expected. However, and
as we shall see by the inspection of the further single subgroups of professions,
professions’s income is very heterogeneous with a wide range of different unequal
income distributions.

The professions’ distributional heterogeneity can be described is as follows:

For a concise discussion all inequality information is ordered by the size of the 14 Gini-
coefficients. The striking result: The most unequal net income distribution can be found
for natural medical practioners (Heilpraktiker) with a Gini-coefficient of 0,70605 (but
see the relatively small cell size) followed by artistic professions and auditors. Last in
order are (beyond the natural medical practioners) all medical Professions: veterenary
doctors, dentists and with the most equally distributed net income: medical doctors
(Gini: 0,34229).

The Atkinson ? = 1 measure show a similar picture with only a slight changing ordering
with regard to auditors and architects and between veterenary doctors and dentists.

The quintile shares deepen the distributional picture: The 90/10 ratios show a broad
spectrum from 10 for medical doctors (as indicating that the cake of the richest is ten
times as much than the cake of the relative poorest) compared to 1.637 for other
business consultants. Although the 90/10 ratio is the preferred measure for a ‘most’
lower and upper distributional tail comparison - because of the relative low cell
occupation of the poorest 10% for almost all professional quintiles might here be more
expressive. The wide range of different distribution tail thickness between the 14 single
professions is confirmed by a 80/20 or a 60/40 ratio (Natural medical practioners: 22,1
(23,5) compared to medical doctors: 2,2 (1,2)). Naturally, these are relative
distributional figures where additionally the wide range of the single net income level
has to be considered (see Table 6).

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