Schwerin (dpa / mv) - In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania there are comparatively few people who earn more than one million euros a year. As reported by the Statistical Office in Schwerin on Wednesday, 177 of the 26,256 income millionaires nationwide in 2018 lived in the north-east. That corresponded to almost 0.7 percent. Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania's share of the total population in Germany is almost 2 percent.
Most of the income millionaires lived in or around the economic center of the country, Rostock - 31 in the district, 24 in the Hanseatic city. But they also increasingly had their home in the districts of Vorpommern-Rügen (26) and Mecklenburgische Seenplatte (25), which are known as holiday regions.
According to the statistics office, the income millionaires achieved their income primarily from commercial operations. 16 of them gave the tax office more than 5 million, including 3 more than 10 million as income. The office did not provide any more detailed information for reasons of data protection.
Industry, which is rather underdeveloped in the north-east, limits incomes - both for most company owners and for employees, whose average wages and salaries are the lowest in Germany. According to the statistics office, the highest tax rate of 45 percent was applied to 1,144 of a total of 758,053 taxpayers in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 2018. Their annual income was more than 260,533 euros, or more than 521,066 euros for those who invested jointly.
The Statistical Office for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania put the revenue from wage and income tax at 3.8 billion euros, around 1.2 percent of the nationwide revenue from this type of tax of 318.3 billion euros. 42.5 percent each goes to the federal and state governments, 15 percent goes to the municipalities.
The data now published is based on the wage and income tax statistics for 2018. Because of the long deadlines for tax assessment, these statistics are only available with a delay of about four years.
