Rural-to-urban migration within eastern Germany has overtaken east-west migration as the main driver of skewed adult sex ratios in rural areas. The shift in migration patterns, according to Nico Stawarz, Matthias Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge and Nikola Sander, presents new opportunities to retain women in rural eastern Germany, particularly for communities near larger cities.
In many European countries, regional variation in internal and international migration tends to be an important driver of regional population structures. The impact is especially pronounced if migration is selective, for example by age, sex or education. The consequences of selective migration are far-reaching, and may include human capital losses, accelerated population aging and sex ratio imbalances.
An interesting case for the study of sex-selective internal migration is rural eastern Germany, one of the regions in Europe with the lowest female-to-male ratio, now below 70% in some areas in the 18–30 age group (Leibert 2016). These imbalances are often attributed to female-dominated migration flows from eastern to western Germany, especially following the German reunification in 1990, which resulted in net population losses in the east of around 1.2 million people. This common interpretation, however, does not account for the counterflows from west to east, or rural-urban migration within the east.
In a recent study (Stawarz et al. 2024), we examined annual inter-county migration flows between 2002 and 2021 to address the question of how internal migration between rural and urban areas in west and east contributed to female shortages in rural eastern Germany. To do this, we aggregated the counties in four regions – rural eastern Germany, urban eastern Germany, rural western Germany and urban western Germany – calculating net migration rates separately for females and males. Counties (Kreise) are classified as urban if their population density is equal to or greater than 150 inhabitants per km², rural otherwise. We focused our analysis on two groups of young adults, aged 18–24 and 25–29 years respectively, because these are the most mobile. To quantify the impact of sex-selective migration flows on sex-ratios more directly, we use the so-called Compositional Impact of Migration (CIM) index proposed by Rodríguez-Vignoli and Rowe (2018).
Rural-urban or east-west migration?
Our results reveal a profound shift in net internal migration rates between eastern and western Germany over the period 2002 to 2021. The beginning of the period was characterized by consistent net migration losses in rural eastern Germany among 18–24-year-olds, especially for women (Figure 1). This confirms earlier work showing that female east-west migration was the key contributor to female shortages during the 2000s. This shifted, however, in the following decade, when net migration losses to west Germany among females declined substantially. In the 2010s, net rural losses to the urban east largely exceeded net rural losses to the urban west. In the second half of our study period, net rural migration losses to the urban east, especially among females, were the main driver of female scarcity in the rural east (although a substantial share of the shifts in net rates between 2014 and 2017 resulted from the redistribution of Syrian refugees within Germany, which was recorded in the population register as internal migration).
Figure 1 also shows that net emigration from the rural east was much stronger among 18 to 24-year-olds than among 25–29-year-olds, among whom, besides, the gender pattern is reversed, with smaller and declining net losses for women. Net internal migration with the urban east turned positive in 2018 and in 2020, respectively, for women and men.
The impact of migration on the sex ratio
The CIM (or Compositional Impact of Migration) index helps us to determine the impact of migration flows on adult sex ratios in the rural east, in terms of both level and change. Our findings are summarized in Figure 2, where negative values, prevalent until 2010, indicate that internal migration aggravated the shortage of women in the rural east, whereas positive values, apparent between 2011 and 2016, indicate that migration alleviated the shortage. Since 2017, the influence of internal migration of 18–29-year-olds has been marginal. The dashed lines reveal that the migration impact has been driven solely by outflows, whereas inflows have tended to alleviate the shortage of women over the entire study period. In short, the impact of internal migration among young adults on sex ratios in rural eastern Germany has weakened over time. Outflows to other regions continue to exert a negative impact, lowering the share of young women in the area, but the destination of these flows has shifted from the urban west to the urban east.
Conclusions
Our findings reveal a sustained shift in young adult net migration rates in rural eastern Germany. Strong net migration losses to the urban west have been replaced by smaller losses to the urban east, and, globally, the impact of internal migration on the shortage of women in the rural east has declined over time. The sex ratio of 18–29-year-olds in the rural east has recovered slightly, from 84% (women per 100 men) at the beginning of our study period to 86% in 2021. The fact that the urban east has become the prime destination for out-migrants from the rural east suggests that these migrants now move over shorter distances to a large city nearby, rather than to western Germany. Not surprisingly, major eastern cities like Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden have experienced sustained population growth in recent years, attracting migrants from the surrounding rural areas, and going through a phase of sustained suburbanization (Stawarz et al. 2022), which is likely to continue in the future. If urban areas in eastern Germany succeed in offering attractive job and career prospects for young men and women, suburbanization may lead to more balanced sex ratios in eastern rural areas.
References
Leibert, T. (2016). She leaves, he stays? Sex-selective migration in rural East Germany. Journal of Rural Studies, 43, 267–279.
Rodríguez-Vignoli, J., & Rowe, F. (2018). How is internal migration reshaping metropolitan populations in Latin America? A new method and new evidence. Population Studies, 72, 253–273. doi:10.1080/00324728.2017.1416155.
Stawarz, N., Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge, M., Brehm, U., & Sander, N. (2024). No place for young women? The impact of internal migration on adult sex ratios in rural East Germany. Population Studies, 78, 547–562. doi:10.1080/00324728.2024.2382154.
Stawarz, N., Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge, M., Sander, N., Sulak, H., & Knobloch, V. (2022). The impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on internal migration in Germany: A descriptive analysis. Population, Space and Place. doi:10.1002/psp.2566.