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rfmcdonaldWhile reading Erik Kirschbaum's Reuters article Demolition business thrives in deserted east Germany", concerning the accelerating decline of the East German industrial city of Schwedt in the context of the continuing relative decline suffered by the East in post-Reunification Germany, my attention was caught be a single paragraph.
No sources are given for this prediction, but if this is correct then the East's relative strength within Germany will shrink remarkably, since the Federal Statistical Office of Germany predicts that the German population will start to shrink from a peak of 83 million in 2013. Further, as Steffen Kröhnert, Nienke van Olst, and Reiner Klingholz noted in their detailed report "Germany 2020 – The Demographic Future of the Nation" (PDF format), Germany's population growth in the second half of the 20th century was predicated largely on heavy immigration.
Ever since the division of Germany, East Germany suffered heavy net emigration, its population falling from 19 million to 17 million after reunification. If the unsourced prediction is correct, in the space of three generations East Germany's population could be halved, its low fertility rate aggravated by a high rate of emigration. Foreign immigration is unlikely given an integrated German labour market.
This brings us to the motivating factors for this demographic trend. Economics is a most prominent factor in this east-to-west migration, but it's far from being the most important. The economic gap between post-Communist Slovenia and Austria is roughly as big, for instance, but far from losing a fifth of its population to Austrian emigration and a low fertility rate Slovenia has continued to attract large numbers of immigrants. The deciding factor appears to be the strong cultural similarities between East and West in the context of a unified nation-state. If South Korea and the North, or (less likely) Romania and Moldova, are ever reunified, planners should expect migrations of comparable amplitude from the poorer part of the new nation-state to the richer.
Closer to home, the East German situation might be a model for the future of peripheral regions inside Canada, where standards of living remain low and labour mobility is high. Newfoundland's population has fallen by a tenth since the collapse of the cod fisheries, after all. A Prince Edward Island of 70 thousand people in 2020?
Some demographic experts have predicted there will be just 9.5 million left in 2020 -- roughly half the 17 million who lived in Communist East Germany when it imploded in 1989.
No sources are given for this prediction, but if this is correct then the East's relative strength within Germany will shrink remarkably, since the Federal Statistical Office of Germany predicts that the German population will start to shrink from a peak of 83 million in 2013. Further, as Steffen Kröhnert, Nienke van Olst, and Reiner Klingholz noted in their detailed report "Germany 2020 – The Demographic Future of the Nation" (PDF format), Germany's population growth in the second half of the 20th century was predicated largely on heavy immigration.
Germany has a half century of uninterrupted population growth behind it. The number of German inhabitants rose from 68 million after World War II to 83 million people today. The reason for that growth was not a high birth rate, but rather about 12 million people who migrated to Germany from foreign countries and their offspring. Already in the mid 1970s, the average number of children per woman fell in Germany below 2.1. This is the number that would be necessary to maintain a certain population size at constant life expectancy and without immigration. For the last three decades, the average number of children has been only 1.4, which means that every newborn generation is about one third smaller than that of its parents. With constant low fertility, the German population would decrease by 700,000 people by the year 2030, even if 200,000 migrants would annually enter the country.
Ever since the division of Germany, East Germany suffered heavy net emigration, its population falling from 19 million to 17 million after reunification. If the unsourced prediction is correct, in the space of three generations East Germany's population could be halved, its low fertility rate aggravated by a high rate of emigration. Foreign immigration is unlikely given an integrated German labour market.
This brings us to the motivating factors for this demographic trend. Economics is a most prominent factor in this east-to-west migration, but it's far from being the most important. The economic gap between post-Communist Slovenia and Austria is roughly as big, for instance, but far from losing a fifth of its population to Austrian emigration and a low fertility rate Slovenia has continued to attract large numbers of immigrants. The deciding factor appears to be the strong cultural similarities between East and West in the context of a unified nation-state. If South Korea and the North, or (less likely) Romania and Moldova, are ever reunified, planners should expect migrations of comparable amplitude from the poorer part of the new nation-state to the richer.
Closer to home, the East German situation might be a model for the future of peripheral regions inside Canada, where standards of living remain low and labour mobility is high. Newfoundland's population has fallen by a tenth since the collapse of the cod fisheries, after all. A Prince Edward Island of 70 thousand people in 2020?
