A university researcher has put the cost of German reunification at 1.5 trillion euros (1.82 trillion dollars), 20 percent higher than previous estimates, a report said Sunday.
Klaus Schroeder, a researcher at Berlin's Free University, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung newspaper that the higher figure could be partly attributed to costs such as the 11-billion-euro bill to finance retirements in the former communist east of Germany.
The German government has never given an overall cost of the massive operation of reuniting the former communist east with the west, but the Halle-based IW institute had published the figure of 1.25 trillion last month.
"Every German government has tried to hide the cost of reunification in order to avoid a debate based on jealousy," said the researcher, no relation to Germany's Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
But divisions have recently begun surfacing between east and west, with some in the more affluent parts of the country showing open resentment to the billions in "solidarity" payments that have been made to the east since the early 1990s.
Residents of the former communist east, where joblessness is markedly higher than in the western states, are bitter that the government's labour market reforms that will slash unemployment benefits will fall disproportionately on them and are making it a major electoral issue as the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall approaches on November 9.
The ruling Social Democrats (SPD) were expected to punished on Sunday by voters in the eastern states of Brandenburg and Saxony.
An opinion poll in the weekly Spiegel magazine to go on sale on Monday showed that nearly six out of 10 Germans in the former communist east believe that it will take "more than 10 years" for their living conditions to catch up with those in western Germany.