Social Science > Emigration and Immigration

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International Monetary Fund. Middle East and Central Asia Dept.
This Selected Issues paper explores drivers of inflation and monetary policy in Georgia. Inflation spiked in Georgia following the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine. A positive output gap indicates that high demand is generating inflationary pressure in the economy. Estimates suggest tighter monetary policy in 2021 helped significantly lower peak inflation in 2022. One response to uncertainty is for monetary policy makers to act more cautiously – responding less vigorously with monetary policy to shocks. Given the challenges in managing inflation in a highly dollarized, small open-economy prone to large external shocks, it is important to look at the drivers of inflation in Georgia, the monetary policy stance including the natural rate, the transmission mechanism including the impact of dollarization, and the appropriate monetary policy path going forward. Using a range of approaches, IMF establish that monetary policy in Georgia is effective, that it is close to neutral, and that heightened uncertainty supports a gradual policy normalization.
Philipp Engler
,
Ms. Margaux MacDonald
,
Mr. Roberto Piazza
, and
Galen Sher
We propose a novel approach to measure the dynamic macroeconomic effects of immigration on the destination country, combining the analysis of episodes of large immigration waves with instrumental variables techniques. We distinguish the impact of immigration shocks in OECD countries from that of refugee immigration in emerging and developing economies. In OECD, large immigration waves raise domestic output and productivity in both the short and the medium term, pointing to significant dynamic gains for the host economy. We find no evidence of negative effects on aggregate employment of the native-born population. In contrast, our analysis of large refugee flows into emerging and developing countries does not find clear evidence of macroeconomic effects on the host country, a conclusion in line with a growing body of evidence that refugee immigrants are at disadvantage compared to other type of immigrants.
Gohar Minasyan
Denmark cancelled a public holiday to increase labor supply, GDP, and fiscal revenues. This chapter discusses the expected labor supply impact of this change and compares it to alternative options for increasing labor supply.
Arina Viseth
This paper uses census and household survey data on Cameroon, Ghana, and South Africa to examine immigration’s impact in the context of a segmented labor market in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that immigration affects (i) employment (ii) employment allocation between informal and formal sectors, and (iii) the type of employment within each sector. The direction of the impact depends on the degree of complementarity between immigrants and native workers’ skills. Immigration is found to be productivity-enhancing in the short to near term in countries where, the degree of complementarity between immigrants and native workers’ skill sets is the highest.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
This Selected Issues paper analyses immigration and the labor market in Malta. This paper finds that immigration has been positive for Malta, as it has helped boost growth, employment, productivity and incomes. The increased availability of foreign labor has also helped contain wage inflation (and hence probably also price inflation) in recent years, contributing to maintain competitiveness in the face of a booming economy. The results suggest that foreign workers have helped contain aggregate wage inflation. The baseline regression includes as regressors the headline unemployment rate, lagged core inflation, labor productivity growth, the share of foreign workers in total employment, and the first and fourth lags of the dependent variable. The results across some selected models suggest that foreign labor has helped contain wage inflation in recent years. In order to identify the drivers of nominal wage growth, a decomposition analysis is conducted which allows calculating the contributions of each of the independent variables included in the regressions.
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 focuses on long-term impact of Brexit on the European Union (EU). This paper examines consequences of Brexit on the EU27 under various post-Brexit scenarios by using two different complementary approaches. Our results, which are broadly in line with recent findings in the literature, are twofold. First, Brexit would have negative effects on the EU27 as well, given the depth and the complexity of the EU-U.K. integration. Similar to various empirical studies, it has been observed that the estimated long-term output and employment losses (in percent) for the EU27 in the study are on average lower than the corresponding losses for the UK estimated in the literature. The level of output and employment are estimated to fall at most by up to 1.5 percent and 0.7 percent in the long run in the event of a ‘hard’ Brexit scenario, respectively. A “soft” Brexit outcome would lead to much lower losses.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
This Selected Issues paper examines the labor market and migration in Sweden. Sweden enjoys a broadly well-functioning labor market. The labor force has been expanding at a healthy pace, in part reflecting rising participation including by females. This paper discusses the compositional changes in the labor force, employment, and unemployment over the past decade. A brief overview of migration flows, their composition, and their demographic benefits is provided. An assessment of the potential implications of the projected increase in migration for unemployment is done. The features of Sweden’s labor market that contribute to the higher unemployment rates of the lower skilled and foreign-born are also outlined.
Mr. Waikei R Lam
,
Xiaoguang Liu
, and
Mr. Alfred Schipke
As China implements reforms under the “new normal,” maintaining stability in the labor market is a priority. The country’s demography and labor dynamics are changing, after benefitting in past decades from ample cheap labor. So far, the labor market appears to be resilient, even as growth slows, driven in part by expansion of the services sector. Migrant flows and possible labor hoarding in overcapacity sectors may also help explain this. Yet, while the latter two factors help serve as shock absorbers— contributing to labor market stability in the short term—if they persist, they may delay the needed adjustment process, contributing to an inefficient allocation of resources and curtailing productivity gains. This paper quantifies to what extent structural trends and the reform pace affect employment growth under the new normal. Delays in reform implementation would weaken growth prospects in the medium term, running the risk that job creation will fall below policy targets, leading to labor market pressures in the future. In contrast, successful transition might require faster reforms, including in the overcapacity and state-owned enterprise sectors, supported by well targeted social safety nets.
International Monetary Fund. European Dept.
This Selected Issues paper examines the prospects for Latvia continuing to rapidly reduce its distance from the productivity frontier. It looks at the empirical record of countries that have in the past attained a similar relative level of income to that of Latvia at present, to gauge the plausibility of the forecast for Latvia’s medium term GDP growth of about 4 percent per year. It highlights that more than one-third of the countries reaching a similar stage of development managed to sustain higher subsequent growth. The paper also confirms the importance of investment and structural reforms for Latvia’s future convergence, using a sector-level analysis.