orker in the east still averages about 70 percent of the western level. Eastern wages, on the other hand, have risen to 90 percent of basic western wages. Wage growth in the east has slowed, however, while productivity levels continue to rise. In some industries that have benefitted from high levels of capital investment - such as the computer and microelectronics industry that has helped to make a boom town of Dresden - eastern workers fully match their western counterparts in output and international competitiveness. The lingering productivity gap has also been partially offset by eastern workers' growing adaptability. Unions in the east have responded to employers' calls for greater labor flexibility by largely abandoning the practice of industry-wide wage settlements common in western Germany for company-specific contracts. Eastern workers also earn high praise from employers and foreign investors these days for being more willing to put in longer hours and to work on weekends or holidays than their western counterparts. The most frequently cited economic disparity between eastern and western Germany is in the scope of unemployment. At its peak late in the mid-decade recession, the unemployment rate stood between 10 and 11 percent in the western states. Eastern Germany, by contrast, saw unemployment jump quickly after unification to about 15 percent and then gradually rise through the recession to over 20 percent. The jobless rate began dropping in both halves of the country in mid-1998, but the decline in the east was more modest and more dependent on government job-creation measures than the job market improvement in the west. Social Unification Germany's ongoing public discussion of social unification has been able to draw upon an abundance of evidence, statistical and anecdotal, that has regularly been offered in the press. Easterners...
