Taxing, Spending, Reaching: Distributional Effects and Public Service Access in Germany

This dissertation argues that inequality and living standards in Germany cannot be understood by looking only at market income or even post-tax-and-transfer income. Instead, households’ welfare is also shaped by non-cash welfare state components (especially publicly financed “foundational” services) and by the spatial organisation that determines whether people can actually access these services. Conceptually, the thesis is grounded in the foundational economy framework, which highlights collective consumption and public commons—services and infrastructures that are essential for everyday life and cannot easily be replaced by private resources. Building on this view, the dissertation treats redistribution from three linked angles: (1) political and fiscal capacity—what can be taxed and how that shapes the state’s ability to fund services; (2) distribution through services—who benefits from in-kind; and (3) distribution through space—how territorial infrastructure patterns enable or constrain real access. The central research question asks how these three dimensions jointly structure the distribution of living standards in Germany. Methodologically, the thesis combines qualitative and quantitative approaches: elite interviews to understand political constraints, microsimulation to construct extended income measures that add in-kind benefits to disposable income, and spatial distance-based indicators to evaluate access and households’ capacity to privately substitute for missing infrastructure. Overall, the dissertation’s contribution is an integrated account of welfare-state redistribution that links taxation politics, service incidence, and spatial accessibility, and it argues for a joint strategy: strengthen fiscal capacity, improve the targeting and design of services, and reduce spatial frictions through infrastructure planning.