BERLIN, Germany (AFP) — Three decades after the Berlin Wall fell, a still-broad but shrinking gap persists between the two halves of a once-divided Germany.

ECONOMY CATCHING UP

“The situation in the east is much better than its reputation,” Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Government declared last month as it published its annual report on reunification.

Notably, the “economic situation is better than we all imagined 30 years ago”.

Economic output per head in the five states in the ex-communist east reached 74.7 per cent of the western states’ level, adding 0.6 points compared with 2017.

Since 2010, the gap has shrunk by 3.1 points, borne up by around 3,000 small- and medium-sized firms and momentum building in major cities like Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden.

But even lively urban areas can’t make up for the lack of major firms. The likes of Volkswagen, Bayer or Siemens are all based in the west, with most of their tens of thousands of well-paid jobs.

None of the 30 companies listed on the blue-chip DAX index at the Frankfurt stock exchange are based in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Federal states in the east trail on other measures, with an average monthly salary of around 2,600 euros (US$2,889) in 2017 — well below the West’s 3,340 euros — and productivity only 82 per cent of western levels.

VANISHING UNEMPLOYMENT

After full employment in the GDR’s planned economy, the east suffered an unemployment surge in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In some towns, more than 30 per cent of the workforce was jobless.

But after a peak in 2005, falling populations and growing numbers of part-time jobs have slashed those numbers.

In August this year, unemployment in the east stood at 6.5 per cent, compared with 4.8 per cent in the west.

Increasingly, towns in former western mining and industrial heartlands are the problem cases, like Gelsenkirchen and Duisburg in North Rhine-Westphalia or port city Bremerhaven.

Meanwhile, the east can boast higher levels of female employment, at 73.9 per cent compared with the west’s 71.6 per cent.

DEMOGRAPHIC DECLINE

Germany’s population is greying across the board, with the average age rising from 40 in 1990 to 45 in 2018.

But the numbers living in the west — including Berlin — have grown since 1991 by more than four million, to 69.6 million, while the east has lost two million inhabitants to age and emigration, falling to 12.6 million.

In some cities like Suhl in Thuringia in the east, or Frankfurt on the Oder in Brandenburg in the west, the population fell more than 30 per cent in just 30 years, undermining public services and infrastructure.

Deserted town centres host empty shops and for-sale signs on homes.

The fact that young adults above all were the ones to move west in the 1990s collapsed the birth rate, with consequences set to last for decades, according to population specialists.

Even the arrival of over one million migrants and refugees since 2015 has done little to reverse the trend, as most are hosted outside the former east.

LURCH RIGHTWARD

Controversy over welcoming migrants helped far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) to new strength in the east.

It regularly scores above 20 per cent in the former communist territories, compared with a ceiling of around 15 per cent elsewhere in Germany.

In June, other political parties blocked the AfD’s choice for mayor of Goerlitz, Saxony, by uniting behind a single candidate and denying the party the laurels of securing a major town.

The east has not seen the same meteoric rise of the Green party as the west.

Instead, it has birthed movements like the Islamophobic Pegida, which demonstrates each Monday in Dresden.

And political scientists point to polls showing many people in the east still feel themselves to be “second-class citizens” in their country.

Some 74 per cent say there remain “very large differences” between the once-divided halves of Germany.