Germany aged everywhere, but growth started from different places.

In 1991, eastern Germany had roughly 73 residents aged 50–79 for every 100 aged 20–49; by 2024, it had 124. The West moved from 69 to 101, while city states moved from 63 to 74.

The raw growth picture seems paradoxical: between 1991 and 2021, the eastern non-city Länder grew by 2.66% per year in real workplace GDP per broad adult, compared with 0.93% in the West.

Did faster aging raise growth?

No. The eastern Länder also began at less than half the western output level, making post-unification convergence a competing explanation rather than a robustness footnote.

My working paper’s benchmark associates a 10% higher old-to-young ratio with 0.317 percentage points less annual growth. It controls for starting output, but it assumes one common convergence path.

A new diagnostic lets catch-up differ by decade and separates East-specific restructuring; the estimate falls to 0.163 points and is no longer statistically resolved.

This does not prove that aging has no effect; it shows that the current regional variation cannot yet isolate aging from convergence, migration, sorting, and commuting.

The mechanism remains open for another reason. Capital per hour rises in one accounting design, but measured capital barely moves while hours fall: a better ratio can conceal a shrinking denominator.

That is the useful preliminary result:

- the demographic transformation is unambiguous.
- the negative composition pattern is real but fragile.
- the automation story is not yet in the data.
- the next evidence must separate people, workplaces, mobility, and regional history.

Paper 0.8.1 is work in progress, and the next result is allowed to change the story.

#Demography #EconomicGrowth #Germany #RegionalEconomics #Productivity #DataStorytelling
