Take, for example, Aarhus Municipality. In the richest area, Risskov, the residents have a 3.6 times as high disposable income as the residents in Gellerup, the analysis states.
In 2010, income in Risskov was three times as high as in Gellerup.
In the Municipality of Copenhagen, Garrison Parish tops, where the income is 2.9 times higher than in Tingbjerg Parish. The divide in 2010 was 2.3.
Bent Greve, professor and social scientist at Roskilde University, does not believe that neither can nor should be aimed at achieving complete equality in municipalities.
– I do not believe you can get a perfect degree of equality. We have different patterns of behavior in terms of savings and consumption.
– It is not necessarily a problem that some for a period have a low income while studying. For there is the prospect of something else at a later date.
– It is also not necessarily a problem that pensioners have a low income because they have had a higher income in the past, he says.
But if inequality becomes too great, it can become a problem, says Bent Greve.
It can be perceived as unfair that some have significantly better living conditions than others, says Greve. He points out that countries and municipalities with great inequality also have several problems with, for example, crime and insecurity.
Greve sees several reasons for the growing inequality in the municipalities.
The social income transfers have not kept pace with the growth in prosperity. At the same time, there have been demographic changes with more people in education who naturally want a lower income, it sounds.
At the National Research and Analysis Center for Welfare, Vive, Nikolai Kristensen is a professor and deals with differences between country and city as well as settlement.
He believes that a large part of the explanation for inequality is rising house prices.
– It comes in the wake of the last 20-25 years of development in real estate market prices. There are certainly several factors, but I think the house price trend is the overriding one. It will strike out in the composition.
At the bourgeois-liberal think tank Cepos, chief economist Mads Lundby Hansen notes that prosperity in the vast majority of parishes has increased, both in the richest and the poorest.
Although the divide between poor and rich parishes has undoubtedly widened, there is therefore no cause for concern – on the contrary, he believes.
– Some say that cohesion is challenged. I do not mean that as long as the overall picture is that the parishes in the municipalities have progressed – only 44 out of approximately 2000 parishes have declined.
– The fact that some are experiencing great progress does not put the others at a disadvantage, he says.
He reminds us that Denmark is high on the list of countries with low inequality – exactly number 7 out of 36 OECD countries.
– We have less inequality than, for example, Sweden and Finland, says Mads Lundby Hansen.
Source: The Nordic Page