Internal Migration in Germany between reunification and financial crisis: Changes in spatial patterns and sex ratios

Existing analyses of net migration flows point to mass migration from the East to the West as the key driver of population decline across East Germany. But available migration statistics suffer from incompatibility over time, largely due to frequent county boundary changes since reunification in 1990. This research aims to gain a better understanding of contemporary internal migration patterns and how they drive population decline and gender imbalances in the East. In drawing on the new German Internal Migration (GIM) database (Sander, 2013), I quantify the impact of East-West migration on Eastern States and their capital cities. The GIM database holds annual migration counts drawn from the population register for 397 regions with temporally consistent boundaries. The results show that in 1995-2004, East-West migration had a stronger impact on population decline in many eastern counties than movements within the East. But this pattern has changed. In 2010, less than half of all net losses from East German counties were to other counties in the East. Gender imbalances toward men in rural Eastern Germany are typically attributed to more young women than men moving from the East to the West. The results suggest, however, that gender imbalances are most pronounced in movements towards the large cities of Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden.