Following German re-unification, East Germany moved from a state-socialist to a market-based economic system. Using West Germany as a "control group", we examine how the change affected the level and the equality of the biological standard of living. We find that before unification, East Germany had a lower but somewhat more equally distributed biological standard of living than the West. After unification, East Germany rapidly caught up in terms of height but at the expense of equality. This suggests that a trade-off exists between a high and an equally distributed biological standard of living. Unlike previous research, we find that West Germany's pre-unification height advantage was smallest in towns with 5000-20,000 inhabitants and largest in cities with 20,000-100,000 inhabitants (females) or in cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants (males). Between regions, height converged both in East and West Germany, but particularly markedly among East-German males. Equality convergence, like height convergence, is significantly larger for East than for West-German males.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Volume (Year): 6 (2008) Issue (Month): 3 (December) Pages: 431-445 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
(with abstract),
plain text
(with abstract),
BibTeX,
RIS (EndNote, RefMan, ProCite),
ReDIF