Without immigration, the working-age population in the Germany’s eastern states will shrink considerably, according to calculations by a leading economic research institute released on Friday.<\/p>\n
The German Economic Institute (IW) estimated that by 2045 more than a fifth, or 22.4%, of the potential workforce would be lost without immigration. The figure for Germany as a whole stands at 17.4%. People aged between 15 and 66 are considered to be of working age.<\/p>\n
According to the IW, around 7.7 million people of working age currently live in eastern Germany. Without immigration, that number would fall to around 6 million, the economic research institute said.<\/p>\n
The states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony-Anhalt would be particularly severely affected.<\/p>\n
The findings come ahead of elections next month in both states, in which the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) is expected to achieve record gains.<\/p>\n
In Saxony-Anhalt, the party could even win an unprecedented absolute majority, allowing it to enter a state government for the first time.<\/p>\n
Worst affected sectors<\/p>\n
“If a region is massively short of workers, the economy can no longer provide for the population,” the IW researchers explained.<\/p>\n
This would be felt especially in professions that are difficult to automate, such as care workers, hairdressers, craftspeople and doctors, they said.<\/p>\n
The demographic worst-case scenario would be the occurrence of a new wave of emigration, like that of the 1990s, as a result of declining attractiveness of the eastern German states, the IW said.<\/p>\n
“This threatens a vicious circle of fewer workers, less economic strength, lower attractiveness for younger people and even more departures,” it noted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Without immigration, the working-age population in the Germany’s eastern states will shrink considerably, according to calculations by a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[56429,3031,56426,35257,5,56428,35258,3849,56427],"class_list":["post-76539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-germany","tag-care-workers","tag-eastern-germany","tag-eastern-states","tag-german-economic-institute","tag-germany","tag-harvest-workers","tag-iw","tag-saxony-anhalt","tag-working-age-population"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}