Mortality differences between Western and Eastern Germany before and after Reunification

Demographic changes and developments in Eastern and Western Germany offer an unique possibility to understand the interaction between societal, social respective economic conditions and population processes. Almost identical demographic composition and behaviour until 1945 were followed by 45 years of life under different political and socio-economic structures resulting in completely different demographic conditions (Dinkel, 1992, 1994, 1999; Gjonca et al., 2000). With Reunification in 1990 the population in Eastern Germany returned to the Western societal and economic system that caused sudden changes in the development of all its demographic parameters. These special preconditions – leading some scholars to describe the Eastern German population as a kind of “natural experiment” (Dinkel, 1999; Vaupel et al., 2003) – generated a large number of researches about changes in Eastern German demography. The aim of this paper is to analyse mortality differences between Western and Eastern Germany before and after Reunification, focusing especially on the rapid convergence of survival conditions since 1990 following roughly two decades of continuous divergence. In recent years several other studies on mortality differences between Western and Eastern Germany have been performed. Trends in mortality in both parts of Germany were analysed focusing on the more intensive improvements in Eastern Germany since 1990. In contrast with this procedure, this study examines directly mortality differences between Western and Eastern Germany instead of an indirect examination via the separate developments of the two parts of Germany. This was similar to that done by Nolte et al. (2000c, 2002) using data for two single years in the 1990s. However, analysing all single calendar years since the 1960s as a complete time series leads to somewhat different results, especially regarding the meaning of some age-specific developments as will be shown in this paper. On the basis of the hypothesis already stated regarding the former divergence in survival conditions, the first step is to describe East German