The economic consequences of the corona pandemic and growing social spending have torn huge gaps in state and social coffers.

The stock of openly reported national debt has so far "only" grown by 10 percentage points to 70 percent of the annual gross domestic product (GDP).

But there are also burdens of 370 percent of GDP in the form of so-called implicit debt.

It shows the current recalculation of the "generation balance", which the Freiburg financial scientist Bernd Raffelhüschen regularly creates with colleagues for the Market Economy Foundation.

Dietrich Creutzburg

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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The entire gap has grown within a year by 95 percentage points to 440 percent of GDP, which corresponds to an amount of 14.7 trillion euros.

This is "the largest invisible mountain of debt in history," the economist summarized his inventory on Thursday.

The reasons for this increase were, on the one hand, a collapse in tax revenues as a result of the crisis.

On the other hand, in addition to additional spending on corona economic aid, there was also the expansion of social benefits.

The most recent expansion of long-term care insurance alone, in conjunction with new state wage requirements, makes up almost 10 percentage points in the long term, according to Raffelhüschen.

Warning of civil servants' pensions

With the implicit debts, he determines which provisions the state would theoretically have to set up in order to finance all of the expenditure that has already been promised without increasing taxes or contributions. An aging society has always been a major driver of implicit debt. Because if the group of social benefit recipients increases in relation to the group of tax and contribution payers, even if the laws remain unchanged, ever greater funding gaps open up over time.

An expansion of social benefit entitlements then increases the gap even further. The same applies in the event of a decline in growth and innovation dynamics in the economy, because the revenue base then shrinks. However, short-term economic influences also have an impact on the calculation - with more favorable economic data, the determined extent of implicit debt could decrease somewhat again in the coming year. However, at most half of the current increase can be attributed to such factors, said Raffelhüschen.

As a problem of growing importance, however, he pointed out the burden on the state coffers, especially the state budgets, by civil servants' pensions. He shares the analysis of other researchers that the great wave of retirement in the civil service is ahead of the aging of the rest of society. The increase in annual pension and allowance expenditure therefore began shortly after the turn of the millennium; With 75 billion euros most recently, they are already not far from their predicted peak.

But that is not a reason to give the all-clear, warns Raffelhüschen. Because the increase in these expenditures by around 25 billion euros since 2010 was in fact financed by the low interest rates - the interest expenditures of the state coffers have since declined by more than this amount. But since interest expenditure cannot go down forever, even stagnating pension expenditure will sooner or later become a growing burden.