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Diva Astinova
,
Romain A Duval
,
Niels-Jakob H Hansen
,
Ben Park
,
Ippei Shibata
, and
Frederik G Toscani
Three years after the COVID-19 crisis, employment and total hours worked in Europe fully recovered, but average hours per worker did not. We analyze the decline in average hours worked across European countries and find that (i) it is not cyclical but predominantly structural, extending a long-term trend that predates COVID-19, (ii) it mainly reflects reduced hours within worker groups, not a compositional shift towards lower-hours jobs and workers, (iii) men—particularly those with young children—and youth drive this drop, (iv) declines in actual hours match declines in desired hours. Policy reforms could help involuntary parttimers and women with young children raise their actual hours towards desired levels, but the aggregate impact on average hours would be limited to 0.5 to 1.5 percent. Overall, there is scant evidence of slack at the intensive margin in European labor markets, and the trend fall in average hours worked seems unlikely to reverse.
Giang Ho
and
Ms. Rima A Turk
This paper presents novel empirical evidence on the labor market integration of migrants across Europe. It investigates how successfully migrants integrate in 13 European countries by applying a unified framework to analyze a rich micro dataset with over ten million individuals surveyed between 1998 and 2016. Focusing on employment outcomes, we document substantial heterogeneity in the patterns of labor market integration across host countries and by migrant gender and origin. Our results also point to the importance of cohorts and network effects, initial labor market conditions, and the differential impact of education acquired domestically and abroad in determining migrants’ subsequent employment prospects. The analysis has implications for the design of effective integration policies.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
This Selected Issues paper analyzes the fiscal challenges in Lithuania. Lithuania’s fiscal position has strengthened in recent years. However, medium term challenges are significant given the severe demographic pressures from population aging and net emigration. Lithuania’s net financial worth of the general government is relatively strong compared with other countries in the region although contingent liabilities from the pension system are sizable. The recent reform of the pension system will help make the system more fiscally sustainable. Upcoming reforms should be carefully designed, considering their trade-offs, to ensure social sustainability; reduce old-age poverty; and limit adverse impact on labor supply and informality.
Samya Beidas-Strom
This paper estimates public sector service efficiency in England at the sub-regional level, studying changes post crisis during the large fiscal consolidation effort. It finds that despite the overall spending cut (and some caveats owing to data availability), efficiency broadly improved across sectors, particularly in education. However, quality adjustments and other factors could have contributed (e.g., sector and technology-induced reforms). It also finds that sub-regions with the weakest initial levels of efficiency converged the most post crisis. These sub-regional changes in public sector efficiency are associated with changes in labor productivity. Finally, the paper finds that regional disparities in the productivity of public services have narrowed, especially in the education and health sectors, with education attainment, population density, private spending on high school education and class size being to be the most important factors explaining sub-regional variation since 2003.
International Monetary Fund. Research Dept.
IMF research summaries on measures of financial integration (by Martin Schindler) and on sovereign wealth funds and financial stability (by Tao Sun and Heiko Hesse); regional study on cross-border labor flows in new European Union member states (by Rudolfs Bems); listing of contents of Vol. 56 No. 1 of IMF Staff Papers, a special issue on frontiers of research on financial globalization; a listing of visiting scholars at the IMF during December 2008–March 2009; and a listing of recent IMF Working Papers.
International Monetary Fund. External Relations Dept.
This paper discusses achievement and failure of science in increasing world animal production. The paper highlights that the application of modern animal production technology is virtually confined to Western Europe, to the North American continent, to Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. The new technologies are not yet used in other parts of the world. Hardly more than a handful of their farmers have any knowledge or understanding of production methods commonplace in highly developed countries.