Eastern Germany on the brink of demographic collapse
Policymakers question whether to pour funds into areas with declining working-age population
Many rural regions in eastern Germany are ageing rapidly, thanks to a collapse in the birth rate and an exodus of young workers to the west © Marco Urban/FT
June 9, 2019 10:00 am by
Tobias Buck in Doberlug-Kirchhain
Manfred Grosser counts himself lucky to be the parish priest of Doberlug-Kirchhain, a picturesque town in rural eastern Germany, halfway between Berlin and Dresden.
His community is lively and his churches well-attended, but a simple ratio gives him pause for thought. For every baptism he celebrates, Mr Grosser presides over five funerals.
He knows what this mismatch means for the future of his parish, but does not want locals to lose heart: “You cannot allow demography to sap your courage,” he said. “This place is worth living in and loving, even if there are dark demographic clouds on the horizon.”
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Mr Grosser and his flock are at the epicentre of an inexorable population shift that is about to hit much of eastern Germany and has started to resonate in the national government.
The district of Elbe-Elster, which includes Mr Grosser’s parish, has some of the worst demographic prospects in Germany. According to a recent study by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, it is set to lose a quarter of its population by 2035. The projected decline in the working-age population is 40 per cent.
Demographers say little can be done. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, eastern Germany was hit by a double blow, with turmoil prompting a collapse in the birth rate and an exodus of young workers to the west. Most of the region now has so few women of childbearing age that recovery and reversal are all but impossible.
“At some point, there are simply too few people left who can physically have children,” said Susanne Dähner, one of the authors of the Berlin Institute study.
Elbe-Elster is an extreme but far from isolated case. Of 77 districts in eastern Germany, 41 are projected to lose at least 30 per cent of their working-age population by 2035. Much larger western Germany has only two such districts. Just five eastern towns and cities — Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Potsdam and Jena — are expected to maintain or increase their population aged 20 to 64.
Even if we had the elixir of life, you cannot compensate for the lack of births here
Christian Heinrich-Jaschinski, head of Elbe-Elster’s district authority
Joachim Ragnitz, a professor of economics at Dresden University of Technology, said demography was among the biggest challenges facing the region. “There are a handful of cities that are growing, but elsewhere regions are shrinking rapidly and ageing rapidly at the same time. This has major economic implications: companies will not be able to find workers and regional disparities will rise sharply,” he said.
Ms Dähner said: “For a long time, the problem of eastern Germany was, above all, the lack of jobs. Now you almost have the opposite problem: they are running out of workers.”
How to preserve these rural areas, or whether to do so, is attracting growing interest among policymakers in Berlin. One reason is the
planned phase-out of coal mining and coal-fired power plants, which will deal a heavy blow to eastern regions that are among Germany’s economically weakest.
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some of the story here , the links behind a paywall for some reason . Ironically Germany should be starting to suffer the ills of inflation by now but I'm going to guess those struggling southern states are conveniently keeping a lid on it .
uk.reuters.com
