Companies in eastern Germany became slightly more positive about their businesses in May after a modest improvement in their assessment of existing conditions, according to a survey issued on Monday.
The IWH (Halle Institute for Economic Research) said its survey of around 300 firms showed that companies (investment interest) with a positive assessment of conditions exceeded those with a negative view by 39 percentage points.
That was three points more than in a similar survey in March.
Those optimistic about the next six months exceeded pessimists by 46 percentage points, stabilising at a high level according to IWH, albeit a slip from 47 points in March.
However, with far more respondents referring to current or future conditions as "more good than bad" rather than an outright "good", IWH said the recovery had not fully taken hold.
IWH said producers of consumer and capital goods had become markedly more positive about the business climate, but those manufacturing intermediate goods had become less positive.
According to a government report released in April, Germany's former communist eastern states will remain a serious drag on the wider economy after the failure of 1.25 trillion euros ($1,495 billion) of transfers since 1990 to transform the region's fortunes.
One of the government's independent economic advisers said in a newspaper on Monday that he did not know how to cure the problems, given wages were already lower, wage agreements played a limited role and financial transfers were continuing.
"There seems little more that economic policy can do," Peter Bofinger, one of the Germany's five so-called "wise men", told Handelsblatt newspaper.
"In light of the many subsidies that the state pays, it should make a new analytic attempt - and charge three or four internationally recognised economists with looking intensively into the theme," he added.