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rfmcdonaldOver at A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh has a post up highlighting East Germany's sharp population decline.
This, he goes on to note correctly, will hamstring the chances of the East German economy for convergence with the West. The only thing that will make the East less of a burden, in fact, will be the shrinking demographic weight of the East in the wider Germany. Atlantic Canada has been experiencing a similar weakening of its relative position in Canada for the past century and a quarter. As an Atlantic Canadian, I'd like to welcome East Germans to this select club of marginalized regions doomed to decline, relative and absolute.
The thing is, it'll be easy to qualify for this club. If I was to make a prediction about the population geography trends of the 21st century, it would be that outside of certain favoured areas--urban areas in the First World in particular, relatively well-off urbanized regions generally--populations will first start to decline relative to the favoured areas, then begin to shrink absolutely. This will be a self-reinforcing process, as Hugh notes, with those regions unfortunate enough to have emigration-depleted population profiles failing to attract the investment that they need to keep up, encouraging the process of emigration to continued, and so on and so forth.
This reconcentration of the world population will proceed mainly within national frontiers, of course. The East Germans aren't heading to the United States, for instance. North Koreans in a reunified Korea may well leave the Korean peninsula in huge numbers, but only because South Korea's likely to restrict southwards movement from an impoverished north for some time to come. Boundaries of nationality and language will discourage migration for some time to come, at least in those countries where sustained improvement is either a reality or a certain promise: That's the reason that the Czech Republic hasn't been emptied by emigration to West Germany since 1989 on the East German model. Give West Germany's labour market time to shrink and age, though.
I can't think of a way to short-circuit this. Take Scotland's immigration policy as announced by the new government, an ambitious effort to recruit migrants from overseas and from the Scottish diaspora. If I qualified, thanks to this policy, for full citizenship in the United Kingdom, would I be that likely to stay in Scotland? Or, would I use my British citizenship as a way to gain access to the etnire European Union? Scotland sounds like a lovely country, and I certainly want to visit it, but absent compelling reasons to remain in Scotland I can't guarantee that I'd stay. Scotland, keep mind, is a prosperous First World country with a standard of living comparable to that of western Europe. What's going to happen to the Third World?
The state-owned KfW development bank project in a report out today [. . .] that the while the population of the old West Germany will drop by six percent between 2002 and 2050, that of the six eastern states will decline by a whopping 25%. Not to mention the fact that those who remain are likely to be even older on average than their Western counterparts. As a consequence the available workforce is likely to fall by a staggering 55%.
This, he goes on to note correctly, will hamstring the chances of the East German economy for convergence with the West. The only thing that will make the East less of a burden, in fact, will be the shrinking demographic weight of the East in the wider Germany. Atlantic Canada has been experiencing a similar weakening of its relative position in Canada for the past century and a quarter. As an Atlantic Canadian, I'd like to welcome East Germans to this select club of marginalized regions doomed to decline, relative and absolute.
The thing is, it'll be easy to qualify for this club. If I was to make a prediction about the population geography trends of the 21st century, it would be that outside of certain favoured areas--urban areas in the First World in particular, relatively well-off urbanized regions generally--populations will first start to decline relative to the favoured areas, then begin to shrink absolutely. This will be a self-reinforcing process, as Hugh notes, with those regions unfortunate enough to have emigration-depleted population profiles failing to attract the investment that they need to keep up, encouraging the process of emigration to continued, and so on and so forth.
This reconcentration of the world population will proceed mainly within national frontiers, of course. The East Germans aren't heading to the United States, for instance. North Koreans in a reunified Korea may well leave the Korean peninsula in huge numbers, but only because South Korea's likely to restrict southwards movement from an impoverished north for some time to come. Boundaries of nationality and language will discourage migration for some time to come, at least in those countries where sustained improvement is either a reality or a certain promise: That's the reason that the Czech Republic hasn't been emptied by emigration to West Germany since 1989 on the East German model. Give West Germany's labour market time to shrink and age, though.
I can't think of a way to short-circuit this. Take Scotland's immigration policy as announced by the new government, an ambitious effort to recruit migrants from overseas and from the Scottish diaspora. If I qualified, thanks to this policy, for full citizenship in the United Kingdom, would I be that likely to stay in Scotland? Or, would I use my British citizenship as a way to gain access to the etnire European Union? Scotland sounds like a lovely country, and I certainly want to visit it, but absent compelling reasons to remain in Scotland I can't guarantee that I'd stay. Scotland, keep mind, is a prosperous First World country with a standard of living comparable to that of western Europe. What's going to happen to the Third World?
