Switzerland Today
Hello from Bern,
In Friday’s briefing: some statistics on income inequality to take you into the weekend, and some disappointing news about the integrity of the Swiss government.
In the news: international travel and subatomic particles to get moving again.
- On Monday May 2 Switzerland will lift all remaining Covid-related entry requirements for inbound travellers, regardless of their country of origin, said the State Secretariat of Migration (SEM). Until now, all countries outside the Schengen zone, apart from a list of exceptions, have been deemed “high-risk” by SEM, meaning tourists or job applicants from these countries were still unable to enter under normal procedures.
- CERN restarted its Large Hadron Collider today, after it was out of action since 2019 for maintenance and upgrades which were further delayed by Covid-19. The current goal of the 27-kilometre tunnel under the Swiss-French border is to look for signs of so-called dark matter. A decade ago, the LHC recorded its most significant success, the discovery of the elusive Higgs boson subatomic particle.
- Finance authorities in low-tax Zug said they have found no individuals or firms on the Russian sanctions list operating in the canton. After noises that Zug wasn’t doing enough to chase down oligarchs and sanctioned firms, the canton’s finance ministry said it had done a thorough check and discovered “no matches”. The region’s finance minister says Zug – home to many Russian citizens and firms – has been “exaggeratedly portrayed” in the media.
Study traces the stability of Swiss income disparities over the years.
A new study reported in the Le Temps and NZZ newspapers today shows that income inequalities in Switzerland have remained “surprisingly stable” over the past century. 100 years ago, the rich were almost as much richer than the poor as they are now – good to know! Concretely, the researchExternal link by the University of Lucerne shows that the share of income going to the top 1% of Swiss earners in 1917 was just over 7%, while in 2018 it had risen to 11%. By international trends, which have seen an increase in such inequalities globally over the past decades, Switzerland is thus a bit of an outlier, writesExternal linkLe Temps.
Is it? Thomas Piketty’s World Inequality Database in fact showsExternal link that globally, the top 1% share of income rose from 17.3% in 1980 to 19.3% today – roughly the same increase that Switzerland saw over the same period (global statistics don’t go back a full century). The Alpine Nation is at least not following the trend of economies like the US (from 10.4% in 1980 to 19.1% today) or China (6.6% to 14%); but the raw data – at least for this indicator – don’t look particularly better than for neighbours Germany (9.4% to 12.8%) or France (8.6% to 9.8%). By European comparison, Switzerland looks fairly normal.
As for redistribution, and whether this 1% is paying its fair share of tax, the (admittedly liberal-minded) NZZ is optimisticExternal link. From 1983 to 2018, the paper writes, the tax paid by the 1% in Switzerland also rose – from 18% to 21.5% of total tax intake. And while this is a much lower contribution than in the 1960s, this is because the tax base has widened drastically since then, due to overall economic progress and a growing (working) middle class. Even nowadays, in some of the country’s low tax havens, the rich are carrying public finances, the NZZ writes: in Zug, the top 1% take home 19% of income, but contribute half of all taxes.
Ultimately the newspaper comes to a similar conclusion as Le Temps: despite economic crises and changes over time, and despite inter-cantonal competition in Switzerland, the picture over the past decades is indeed one of “marked stability”. Next week SWI swissinfo’s data specialist is planning to take a closer look at the study.
Swiss government to sell itself to the highest bidder.
If you always believed in the utmost integrity of the Swiss government, and that it could never be bought off, then you’d be wrong. Next week, the government is up for auction: that is, 30 personal objects belonging to the ministers are part of a sale, co-organised by the Red Cross, to raise money for people who suffered from the pandemic. Objects include the tie (see photo) worn by Interior Minister Alain Berset when he announced a lockdown in March 2020; a rösti grater used by Environment Minister Simonetta Sommaruga; a lucky jacket worn by Economics Minister Guy Parmelin; and Finance Minister Ueli Maurer. The bidding starts at CHF100 per object, and the auction goes on for three weeks.
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