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FIGURE 5. Urban-rural distribution of population.

supply. Only a small number of citizens of other Eastern European countries, all of which have migration restrictions, have taken up permanent residence in East Germany. Most of these have been Eastern European who married East Germans, but increasing numbers of foreign workers and professional people from Eastern European countries work in East Germany on a contractual basis. Medical doctors, for example, were imported from Bulgaria after 1958 when many East German doctors fled to the West because of regime efforts to eliminate private practice. Since 1965, Poland, with a labor surplus, has sent tens of thousands fo workers on short-term contracts to labor-short East German mines and factories. Some Poles also have been employed as day laborers in towns, such as Wilhelm-Pieck-Stadt Guben, on the border with Poland. Since 1967 provision has also been made to import up to 4,000 Hungarian workers annually to ease the East German labor shortage.

There has been a reverse migration from West Germany to East Germany. This movement occurs for a variety of reasons, including reunification of families, flight from justice, disillusionment with West German life, and employment opportunities. Exact figures are not available, because West German authorities do not require emigrants to East Germany to register. Estimates vary from 19,000 to 46,000 annually for the years 1950-61 and between 2,000 and 7,000 annually since 1961.

The overall decline in the population of East Germany—largely due to the refugee flow prior to 1962—is abetted by a continuing low rate of natural population increase. The migration to West Berlin and West Germany contributed to this low rate because more than one-fourth of the 2.3 million emigrants who left before the wall was constructed were in the 20- to 29-year age bracket, the most fertile age group. The brith rate had recovered considerably in the early postwar period, reaching a high of 16.9 per 1,000 inhabitants in 1951 (Figure 7). After a slow decline to 15.6 in 1958, it rose quickly to 17.6 in 1961. Since 1963 another decline has set in, the rate falling to 13.9 per 1,000 in 1970, one of the lowest in the world. Despite government efforts to encourage large families, the birth rate is expected to continue to decline, reflecting the decrease in persons of childbearing age resulting from the fewer births during and immediately after the war, the increasing availability of birth control devices, the easing of restrictions on abortion, and the high proportion of women in the labor force. Because of the inordinately high percentage of old people in the East German population and the consequent high death rate, East Germany for some years has had the lowest rate of natural increase of any European country, falling at times (in 1969 and 1970) into a net decrease (Figure 7). In the first decade of the GDR's existence, the rate of natural increase fluctuated between 5.3 per 1,000 inhabitants in 1951 and 2.7 per 1,000 in 1957; after the closing of the borders with West Germany, the rate of natural increase spurted to 4.7 per 1,000 in 1963, but it has since dropped sharply. In 1969 there was a natural decrease of 0.3 per 1,000 persons. The following tabulation compares rates of natural increase per 1,000 population in selected countries for 1970:

U.S.S.R.	9.3
United States	8.8
Poland	8.6
Switzerland	6.9
France	6.1
Czechoslovakia	4.4
United Kingdom	4.4
Sweden	3.7
Hungary	3.1
Austria	1.9
West Germany	1.7
East Germany	-0.2

Deaths in the first year of life declined from a high of 131.4 per 1,000 live births in 1946 to 18.8 per 1,000 live births in 1970, beating the rate in West Germany, the United States, and all of Eastern Europe. The overall death rate also declined sharply from 22.9 per

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