East German Fertility After Unification: Crisis or Adaptation?

Abstract

Not available in German. Since the fall of the wall, East Germans have drastically changed their demographic behaviour. Marriages and births have dropped to an unprecedented low level. Our paper tracks birth rates of the East German population, past, present, and future. We propose a imulation model of future cohort fertility. The hyptheses we develop build on the historical record of reproductive behaviour in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) since 1960 and on an analysis of the pattern of change between 1990 and 1994. The particular emphasis lies on the assumption that East German couples will rapidly westernize their family size by trying to reach completed fertility levels of the corresponding West German cohort. This implies that the resulting adaptation process includes the post-unification crisis as a logical first step.

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