If you ever get into a car on the western side of Germany, and drive eastward....as you cross the old DDR-border....you start to notice small things to remind that it's not ONE single country. I admit....twenty-seven years....have come and gone, but the idea that Germany has unified and it's all the same, simply isn't true.
ARD posted a story this morning over the issues of Germany 'unity'.
One of the big items is salary structure. If you live in the old east...your average salary is 2,640 Euro. If you live in the west, it's 3,230 Euro. Roughly a 25-percent difference.
The Dax issue was also brought up. The Dax is the economic listing of top thirty companies in Germany and their daily progress up or down on the scale. From the old DDR territory....not one single company has made it into the Dax. The current listing is all west Germany owned.
It's an interesting article worth reading.
Anyone expecting some balance to ever occur? No. I don't think any economic expert thinks that it'll ever come to be even.
Part of this story also relates to the national unemployment map of Germany. If you did pull the unemployment numbers for Dresden for example....they are between 7.0 and 7.5 percent unemployed. In Bavaria, 3.8 percent unemployed. There are certain particular states where it makes no sense to bring more migrants or immigrants into an area. Go look at the largest draw area for migrants in Germany today....in the northwest (NRW)....where unemployment is 7.7 percent (spring 2017 numbers). If you go and dump 3,000 migrants into NRW....it makes little sense unless they had high technical skills or special crafts. Yet no one talks about this angle of the immigration issue.
A unified nation? No....sixteen states, and each telling a different story.
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