150,000 Germans left Germany in 2006

just watching RTL. talking about emigration.

now we know why the unemployment rate is falling.

where are they all going?

You need to watch that show on VOX to find out (there is a show about emigrants, forgot what it's called, amybe Die Auswanderer?). I would think a large percentage to other EU countries, some to South Africa, Australia, Canada and USA. And some other random countries.

Switzerland is the most popular destination for Germans. A lot of that 150,000 figure however is actually "Germans" moving back to their country of origin, e.g. Turks born in Germany or given citizenship here moving back to Turkey.

This figure isn't really very high when you consider that 400,000 people left the UK in 2006 – about four times the rate of emigration compared to Germany, when you factor in population size. Also, 71 percent of those emigrating expect to come back to Germany at some point and only 22 per cent are "very happy" with their new home country.

Before talking about the effects on unemployment, you also have to consider the numbers moving to Germany, a rather obvious point on an expat forum.

Viele Auswanderer wollen irgendwann zurück

That statistic probably includes all the Germans that go abroad for a couple of years knowing that they will return to Germany after their posting is up. They probably count everyone that de-registered and gave an address abroad as their new residence.

In some of those "Auswanderer" shows that I've seen, they showed someone send to Japan for a couple of years for work and the German pastor in London. Neither of those are true emigrants, they're just regular expats.

i've seen a few episodes of the show on vox.

according to the news report on RTL, the main destinations were (are) switzerland, austria, and i've forgotten the other country.--but for obvious reasons die schweiz und österreich because of the shared language. there was an article in der speigel at the beginning of the year. swiss people referr to germany as 'the big canton.' btw, there was absolutely no mention of turkey.

IIRC, in 2006 it was (in descending order) Switzerland, United States, Austria.

Yeah, and how many others left their country? 150K? Hell, half of them could be students going to a real school for a real well rounded education. I mean are you saying that crossing borders is a bad thing? We are here aren't we? What is your point? Are we going in the wrong direction or what?

If you watch shows like Deutschland die Auswander, you'll know that most of these people will probably come back. I really quite like the show actually. You see loads of unprepared whingers packing up everything, selling their house and moving to their favourite holiday location without a job because they think that normal life will be like their holiday. Needless to say, after a few weeks of Italian disorder and noise, or South African crime, most of them realise it wasn't too bad in Germany after all.

They always seem to track impecunious Wohnsilo-resident US Green Card lottery-winning types who move to blue-collar trailer parks in sunbelt states ("schoen warm!") with half-baked, completely un-researched dreams of walking around on the beach. Then inevitably end up boo-hoo-ing over having to pay private health insurance and/or not finding nutella at the local Kwik-E-Mart.

They always seem to miss covering the millions of German biotech researchers, university professors and investment bankers who move to the UK or US and end up happy as a clam. Or, worse yet, the high-profile German CEOs and (gasp) former communist politicians who go abroad to either a) educate their children in real univiersities and/or b) top up their socialist-workers-paradise-depleted personal coffers with a real job before running out the clock in suburban Duesseldorf.

The main message to the great unwashed seems to be "see, you're better off staying in a regressively-taxing, dehumanizing culture like ours." More GEZ publically-financed propoaganda to keep people miserable.

It's probably more a reflection of who applies to be filmed in the first place. You'd have to have at least a streak of pikey in you to agree to it.

Expaticus makes a good point about the significant numbers of German professionals doing very well in the US, but their lives don't make great copy like those of the ne'er do wells that apparently get depicted in these shows. Most people are better off staying in their homeland unless it is uninhabitable or they have great career opportunities elsewhere.

The number of Germans moving to Switzerland has increased dramatically in recent years, because the Swiss used to restrict access to their labor market, but recently they changed their approach, and now most EU-nationals can get a work permit there quite easily. Considering there's no language barrier, and net salaries are higher, it's no surprise that Switzerland is appealing. I know several Germans that moved to Switzerland during the last few years. None of them considers it to be "emigration". Just changing jobs and moving to another German-speaking city (nearly always Zurich).

http://switzerland.isyours.com/e/faq/bilat...agreements.html

Hilarious.
There might be a correlation between the level of education and the willingness to be seen on VOX. Millions? From crap unis? Joschka Fischer has bought a house in Berlin. VOX and Kabel 1 belong to a private company.

Millions collectively ... 1% of 82.5 million is 825,000, so 10 years of ourward emigration of the top 1% is 'millions" by any measure.

Betcha Fischer also bought a house in New Jersey with overvalued Euros. "Duesseldorf" is an American joke punchline similar to "New Jersey" ... as in "he was the head of the nuclear physics department at the university of Vladivostok, until he ran away to become a busboy in Duesseldorf to earn more than $10/month".

But who pays the full freight for VOX and Kabel 1's parasitic existence? The GEZ subsidizes blasting the Wetten Das units up into the heavens. "Private" companies, indeed ... about as private as the Deutsche Post "AG" (when we're not busy being communists).

LOL, indeed.

I think you're trying to make a point; not sure what it is though. Is it contradicted by the fact that the emigration rate from the UK is four times as great?

Has anyone got an annual net population movement figure for germany or is that 150,000 departures, netto?

In 2006 there was a net "surplus" of 22,791 persons.
According to this article the share of highly qualified persons who leave Germany is 28% vs. 20% hqp share in the overall population. On the other hand most of these people live abroad only temporarily.

So ARD and ZDF can influence the program of the privately owned broadcasting stations? Sure...
As to Socialism: 16% of all employees in the US are employed by uncle sam, the UK has 22% public servants, Germany 12,5%.
Go, read a book or so

Eugene, the figures for the US (and for that matter the UK) don't sound right. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 1.8 million federal government workers in the US excluding Postal Service workers. That doesn't include the military either, but to reach 16% of the US workforce, around 24 million people would have to be employed by the federal government alone (which is what Eugene means by Uncle Sam for those who may not know).

EDIT: According to Wikipedia, 790,000 people were employed by the US Postal Service in 2003, and there were 1.42 million people on active duty in the military as of October 31, 2007. That gives us a total of a bit over 4 million, or about 2.7% of the total US workforce.

Extrapolating from this chart http://www.mdp.state.md.us/msdc/Gov_Emp/chart1_2006.pdf, the percentage of state and local government workers in the US was (at most) 3.2% of all workers in 2006 (assuming a total population of 300 million and employment of about 150 million).

Looks like around 6.9% is the ballpark figure for all government employment in the US.

At what percentage do you start calling it Communism. Nearly a quarter of all employees are working as public servants, I find that incredible.

I meant 5.9%!

When the political structure is Communist instead of Liberal Democratic, which is what it is now. The percentage of publicly employed people has no bearing on political structure. The UK's figure is high because of the NHS.

It's high whatever way you flavour it. with around 5% unemployment who you can classify as being paid by the state but not doing anything you have a quarter of all people in the UK dependant on the Government for their livelyhood. Is this a record high?

As of 2002, c. 3 millon people were emplyed by the US federal governement. Out of c. 300 million, that's 1%. Eyeballing the state civil servant population on the same site, I'd conservatively say it's an average of c. 100,000 per state * 50 = 5 million ... call it 2%. Add in Conquistidor's military and postal workers, and we're up to a total of c. 10 million ... out of his 150 million , that roughly ties out to his 6.9% estimate.

It's an old number, but this pegs German civil servants at 16.6% of the population. Civil servants have complete job security, generous pensions, and higher net incomes than salaried employees. In return for these advantages, civil servants are to serve the state loyally and carry out their duties in a nonpartisan way. This does not, however, prevent civil servants from being active in politics and even being elected to public office. Could someone please hack this website and append "... and be complete dickheads"? Thank you.

Don't forget a certain percentage of Deutsche Telekom workers (can't remember if it is 30% of them or less) are public servants who have job protection "for life".

That claim in the source Eugene posted of a third of the workforces of Sweden and Denmark being government employees also sounds specious.

thanks Eugene, i guess some of the high-qualified (i suppose this might include handwerker) emigration is self-selecting as it's much easier to stay long-term elsewhere, in new world countries at least, with an in-demand job unless you marry into the place.

OK, according to the German Statistical Agency, there were 4.576 million government workers (at all levels) in April 2006:
http://www.destatis.de/jetspeed/portal/cms...enderPrint.psml

Looks like there were 26.354.336 jobs where employers/employees were required to pay social benefits on June 30, 2006 (includes interns).
http://www.destatis.de/jetspeed/portal/cms...enderPrint.psml

That gives us an approximate percentage of 17.4% of the German workforce being government employees, which is probably lower today because of the rise in private sector employment in the past 18 months.

Civil servants also include the people working at the various research institutions throughout Germany.

How about patent examiners? Are they civil servants? Even if they are expatriots?

So are, for example, federal researchers at the National Institutes of Health, National Space and Technology Center, and the Laboratory for Physical Sciences in the US.

How many researchers are we talking about in Germany, eurovol?

To be really finicky, the figure is even lower (roughly 16 %), because those civil servants with the status of "Beamte" are not sozialversicherungspflichtig, i.e. they are not part of the 26.4 m (adding 1.7 m Beamte to the 26.4 m gives a total of 28.1 m people).

What about the municipal workers? A large proportion of the German civil servants are employed on a municipal level.

Also, some groups are employed on different "levels" in the US as compared to Germany: Teachers are a large group. They are employed by the states in Germany, but by the municipalities in the US (AFAIK), and therefore not included in the 6.9 % calculated above, right? Then there's the police force, which is state-level in Germany, but to a large extent municipal in the US (right?), i.e. also not included above.

There are some 27k people working for the Helmholtz Association of institutes alone. I also don't think this number includes the "non-permanent" people like students and short term contracted scientists. The annual budget is over 2 billion though.

Intriguing. I've never heard of Helmholtz before. And I thought I knew a thing or two about Germany...

Its all part of the reorganization of all the German Institutes to try to stop duplication of research sucking up resources and taking the patents out of the hands of individual scientists that have not a clue how to market the new technology. The whole thing is a major pain in my side at the moment, but that is getting off the subject except to say quite a few like me are leaving because the science world in the states is a helluva lot better organized.

You seem to have strange ideas about government involvement in public television. The GEZ does not answer to the federal government...financial independence from the government is its very raison d'être. And even if the German government had power over the GEZ, they wouldn't be able to influence the programming of private broadcasters. What exactly would they threaten them with? Launching their own satellite and making public TV unavailable to 99% of the people having their dishes pointed at Astra? A likely story...

There are several reasons why they would show regular joes struggling in their new home country (if you look at the migration statistics, the vast majority of emigrants actually does come back), but government-sponsored propaganda is not one of them.

Politicians (in this case the governments of most German states) actually wanted to block the last increase in TV fees (because it was wildly unpopular), but the ARD went to court, and obtained a court ruling which stated that politicians are not allowed to meddle with their financing (in this case, are not allowed to dictate lower fees). So the fee increase went ahead...

http://www.gebuehrenstop.de/rundfunk/info...erfassungsklage

Most primary and secondary teachers are employed by either counties or cities (municipal). Professors are state employees if they teach at public universities or are private sector workers if they teach at private universities.

I say "most teachers" because the US has quite a few private schools, whose employees are obviously not government employees.

I actually thought that the 12.5% figure put forward by Eugene's source for German government employment at all level sounded realistic.

So you are saying that all employees of states, counties and municipalities in the US only account for 2 % of the total work-force, i.e. roughly 1 % of population? I have no figures myself, but it sure sounds low.

After a quick websearch, it seems that Germany has a total of 800,000 teachers in the public school system, i.e. teachers alone already account for 2-3% of all employees. I assume the number is higher in the US, as the population there is younger and the fertility rate higher.

As for the US, there are apparently 3.1 m teachers, i.e. roughly 2 % of the overall workforce (though not all of them on the public payroll):
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/re...ons/001737.html

Edit:
I read too hastily. 3.1 m is the number of elementary + middle school teachers only. The total is roughly double, i.e. 6 m = 4 % of the workforce!

It is worth noting that while Blair did indeed expand public employment in the UK, at the same time the involvement of the private sector in th provision of what are held as public goods also increaed with the the Provate Financing Initiative et al.

Having had a look at the US Bureau of Economic Analysis website, I see that the US has approximately 24 million workers at all levels of government (to include military, police, postal workers, teachers, etc.) which works out to approximately 16% of all employment in the US.

However, what is rather interesting to note are the OECD statistics on government spending as a percentage of GDP in 2004. Germany's was 47.5%, and that of the US was 36.4%.

IIRC, the UK actually topped the 50% mark a couple of years ago.

Wonder how they account for the various social security stuff. For example, what about health insurance, where Germany has a public and a private system which coexist (and the "public" system is not really "run" by the government either) - to what extent is this "government spending"? I'm sure the quoted 47.5 % includes the full social security "package", otherwise the number couldn't be anywhere close, because tax revenue as percentage of GDP is way lower.

Having more government employees is not a bad thing though. It all depends on the service and the level of quality. In a complete free market system, quality would be lacking for those that can't afford it. That is what the government is there for. It doesn't stop someone from paying extra for extra quality, but the level of basic services should not go down for the general populous in total. A good government would run at a low level of waste and abuse, a bad one would be full of waste and abuse. Government is there for the common defense and welfare of its citizens.

The public health kassen do count as government spending in Germany.
The fact that they are often broke is a significant factor in the problems Germany has in keeping its level of new public debt down for ECB conformity.

At least Germany will have no problem with that in 2007, what with projections showing a slight government surplus for the first time in living memory (at least my living memory, some older folks might choose to disagree...)