What is a reason that eastern Germany has a poorer economy than western Germany?

Answer 1

The Primary reason was that East Germany was controlled by a communist government in Germany and by the Soviet Union, whereas West Germany had a democratically elected government that allowed a free market economy that traded with the rest of Western Europe and was protected by the NATO military alliance. Also the western areas of Germany had historically more developed industries than the eastern areas which were more agricultural.

Answer 2

There are two questions here: one about prosperity and one about racism.

Prosperity
The reason for East Germany being less prosperous is relatively straightforward. During the Cold War, West Germany was a capitalist country whose leaders invested in rebuilding and creating powerful industry and, conversely, East Germany was a communist country whose leaders invested little in helping the people to succeed economically. As a result, when Germany reunified in 1990, Western Germany was far more economically advanced than Eastern Germany.

Racism
The pejorative of racism is often imputed in many cases where it is not proper and this happens to be one of them. Eastern Germans are not "more racist" than Western Germans, they simply have a fundamental disagreement about the cultural future of Germany. Western Germans often want Germany to become a multicultural country with numerous minorities and cosmopolitan atmosphere. Eastern Germans often want Germany to remain a traditionally German country with historic German values (like human rights, respect for women, collective guilt for the Holocaust, etc.) and are worried that large-scale Immigration could up-end that system. The fact that the majority of these immigrants happen to be of a different race is irrelevant to the discussion since it is one about culture and values. East Germans have the same problem with Russian immigration, even though Russians are the same race as Germans, and they do not have a problem with Vietnamese immigrants, even though the Vietnamese are clearly a different race than Germans. It has to do with how these minorities will behave once in Germany and whether this behavior is consistent with those German values.

Many of the fears of East Germans are increasingly becoming true as the mass immigration prompted by the German government has resulted in increased crime rates and cultural-conflict between new immigrants who are unfamiliar with German values and German citizens who are used to living with these values. However, rather than discuss this serious issue, Western Germans who support large-scale immigration find it far more useful to label their opponents as "racists" to avoid the debate altogether.

Answer 3

East Germany has had to switch from a command economy.

Answer 4

germany has serveral econimic restructions in the east