The tax wedge on labour – i.e. the burden of taxes and social security contributions on labour income – is a frequently discussed topic. An article from the Bundesbank’s current Monthly Report examines the tax wedge on labour in greater detail. It looks, in particular, at the difference between pension contributions and tax payments. “A nuanced analysis of tax wedge ratios makes an important contribution to enabling better interpretation of tax wedges,” the authors of the article write. 

The Bundesbank has unveiled its TIA platform, enabling staff across the institution to harness artificial intelligence. Users can configure text-based intelligent assistants (TIAs) to their particular requirements and share them with others. And they don’t need to write a single line of code to do so, because state-of-the-art technology can digitalise processes in less than five minutes.

The Bundesbank’s “Banking supervision in dialogue” symposium ranks among the key forums for banking and financial supervisory topics in Germany. This year’s event in Frankfurt am Main centred around ten years of the SSM, artificial intelligence, and crypto-assets regulation. Speakers included Bundesbank Executive Board member Burkhard Balz, FINMA CEO Stefan Walter, SSM Chair Claudia Buch (European Central Bank) and Karlheinz Walch (Director General Banking and Financial Supervision, Deutsche Bundesbank).

The Bundesbank sees the German economy slowly regaining its footing after a roughly two-year period of weakness. Not only will private consumption gradually pick up again, but export business will also improve again from the second half of the year. “The German economy is extricating itself from the period of economic weakness,” Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel said on publication of the current Forecast for Germany. According to the forecast, real gross domestic product (GDP) will rise by a calendar-adjusted 0.3% this year.