[LINK] "Germany's shrinking east"
Jun. 22nd, 2009 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldOver at his blog, Claus Vistesen examines the background behind the former East Germany's ongoing population decline.
By comparison, in normal First World countries with low infant mortality rates, a TFR needs to be in the range of 2.1 for a population to sustain itself.
He goes on to note the particular dynamics of out-migration from East Germany--the particularly hard impact on small and middle-sized communities, the disproportionately large number of women and young adults leaving--and speculates about the implications of East Germany's experiences for Germany as a whole.
Go, read.
[W]omen in East Germany essentially stopped having children all together. In a paper from 1994 detailing the immediate evolution of East German fertility in the context of the reunification process, Nicholas Eberstadt shows how births in East Germany indeed did fall dramatically. From 1988 to 1992 the total number of live births fell from 215700 to 88300 which translates into a drop in the crude birth rate from 12.1 to 5.6.
[. . .]
According to Eberstadt and given the information available at the time, the drop was especially severe because fertility dropped sharply among women aged 25-34 and thus among those women in their prime age with respect to childbearing. Furthermore, Eberstadt also shows how marriage rates declined sharply during the transition from communism. Marina A. Adler notes that the highly insecure environment following communism made women reluctant to engage in the kind of long term commitments which marriage and child rearing constitutes. In fact, the almost effective halt in childrearing occuring in East Germany is not so unique in the general sense since the fall of communism also marked a decisive structural break in the context of the fertility behavior of an entire generation of women all across the Eastern European edifice. In this sense, Sobotka offers a comprehensive view of the drivers of the fertility transition in the context Eastern Europe.
The ultimate effect of the shift in an Eastern Germany context was remarkable; Eberstadt estimates that the TFR had fallen to an astonishing 0.98 in East Germany by 1991.
By comparison, in normal First World countries with low infant mortality rates, a TFR needs to be in the range of 2.1 for a population to sustain itself.
He goes on to note the particular dynamics of out-migration from East Germany--the particularly hard impact on small and middle-sized communities, the disproportionately large number of women and young adults leaving--and speculates about the implications of East Germany's experiences for Germany as a whole.
Go, read.
