Migration and jobs: Is Europe's labour market adjusting?

摘要

The question of whether or not migration, and in particular free mobility within Europe, can play a role in reducing unemployment is a highly topical one. In the EU, harmonised unemployment rates rose between 2007 and Q3 2014 from 7.2% to 10%. However, not all countries were equally affected. Whereas the unemployment rate rose in Greece and Spain over the same period by about 18 and 16 percentage points, respectively, it actually declined in Germany, by almost 4 percentage points. At the larger regional level, by 2012, disparities were even more pronounced, ranging from 1% in the Finnish region of Aland to 30% in the Spanish region of the Canary Islands, and are unlikely to have changed much since. The Canary Islands were also the region which experienced the largest increase in unemployment rates during the crisis, by more than 18 percentage points, whereas the unemployment rate declined in the five eastern Lander of Germany by seven to nine percentage points. In the United States, the spread of state-level unemployment rates was much smaller, ranging from a low of about 3% in North Dakota to a high of 13% in Michigan in 2012. In terms of unemployment at the larger regional level, the variation is more than twice as large in Europe as in the United States.