German unification is about to enter its second decade, and despite massive financial transfers, the political promise of a "blooming landscape" remains a vision. This text asks what went wrong, and what the available options were - or is the East German labour market better than assumed.

A historically unique experiment is about to enter its second decade - German unification. Early hopes for a rapid and smooth economic transformation soon turned out to be overly optimistic. Despite massive financial transfers, the political promise of a "blooming landscape" remains a vision. Actual developments have left deep scars on the labor market, and the effects will be felt for decades to come. Was this outcome to be expected, perhaps even inevitable? What went wrong, and what were the available options? Or is the current state of Eastern German labor market in fact better than is...