TY - JOUR
T1 - Can the European community absorb more immigrants? A general equilibrium analysis of the labor market and macroeconomic effects of east-west migration in Europe
AU - Weyerbrock, Silvia
N1 - Funding Information:
Address correspondence to Silvia Weyerbrock, Department of Economics, Columbia Univer-sit),, 420 West ll8th Street, New York, N.Y. 10027. I would like to thank Irma Adelman for many helpful suggestions and Sherman Robinson for programming advice. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge comments from Jeffrey Perloff, Barry Eichengreen, Andrew Keeler, Douglas Christian, and participants at a CEPR workshop on European Migration in November 1993. This research was supported by a John L. Simpson Fellowship of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Received October 1993; final draft accepted March 1994.
PY - 1995/4
Y1 - 1995/4
N2 - Largely driven by emigration from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, immigration into Western Europe has recently increased to 1.7 million immigrants per year. In this paper, we analyze the labor market and macroeconomic effects of immigration of 3.5 and 7 million workers from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union into the European Community (EC) in a six-region, 14-sector computable general equilibrium model. Our experiments show that labor immigration does not lead to the catastrophic conditions in EC labor markets feared by EC citizens. This result holds even when ignoring capital stock growth. Experiments that include capital stock and labor force growth in the EC show that the EC can absorb 3.5 million immigrants. Seven million immigrants, however, cause some unemployment and a small loss in per capita income. Other experiments show that cuts in the order of 1 percent in fixed urban wages contribute to easing adjustment problems on EC labor markets substantially. The EC is found to benefit from immigration if wages are flexible.
AB - Largely driven by emigration from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, immigration into Western Europe has recently increased to 1.7 million immigrants per year. In this paper, we analyze the labor market and macroeconomic effects of immigration of 3.5 and 7 million workers from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union into the European Community (EC) in a six-region, 14-sector computable general equilibrium model. Our experiments show that labor immigration does not lead to the catastrophic conditions in EC labor markets feared by EC citizens. This result holds even when ignoring capital stock growth. Experiments that include capital stock and labor force growth in the EC show that the EC can absorb 3.5 million immigrants. Seven million immigrants, however, cause some unemployment and a small loss in per capita income. Other experiments show that cuts in the order of 1 percent in fixed urban wages contribute to easing adjustment problems on EC labor markets substantially. The EC is found to benefit from immigration if wages are flexible.
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U2 - 10.1016/0161-8938(94)00013-6
DO - 10.1016/0161-8938(94)00013-6
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:0039975275
SN - 0161-8938
VL - 17
SP - 85
EP - 120
JO - Journal of Policy Modeling
JF - Journal of Policy Modeling
IS - 2
ER -