Lagarde singled out Germany and Spain as examples. Germany\u2019s GDP would be about 6 percent lower today without migrant labor, while Spain\u2019s strong recovery also \u201cowes much\u201d to foreign workers, she said. Across the eurozone, employment has expanded by more than 4 percent since 2021, even as central bankers pushed through the steepest rate hikes in a generation.<\/p>\n
The ECB president argued that migration has played a crucial role in offsetting Europe\u2019s shrinking birth rate and growing appetite for shorter working hours. That, she said, helped companies expand output and damped inflationary pressures<\/a> even as wages lagged behind prices.<\/p>\n But Lagarde also acknowledged the politics. Net immigration pushed the EU\u2019s population to a record 450 million last year, even as governments from Berlin<\/a> to Rome<\/a> move to restrict new arrivals under pressure from voters flocking to far-right parties.<\/p>\n \u201cMigration could, in principle, play a crucial role in easing labor shortages as native populations age,\u201d Lagarde said. \u201cBut political economy pressures may increasingly limit inflows.\u201d<\/p>\n She stressed that Europe\u2019s labor market has emerged from recent shocks in \u201cunexpectedly good shape.\u201d But she cautioned against assuming that dynamic will last: demographic decline, political backlash and shifting worker preferences still threaten the eurozone\u2019s resilience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lagarde singled out Germany and Spain as examples. Germany\u2019s GDP would be about 6 percent lower today without…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20805,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[10005,79,2813,17918,6930,2986,179,18,233,7520,17919,17920,6621,7111,19,56,185,17,6045,188,6395,17921,13677,383,384],"class_list":{"0":"post-20804","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-banks","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-central-banks","11":"tag-christine-lagarde","12":"tag-companies","13":"tag-demographics","14":"tag-economy","15":"tag-eire","16":"tag-employment","17":"tag-energy","18":"tag-eurozone","19":"tag-fuels","20":"tag-germany","21":"tag-growth","22":"tag-ie","23":"tag-immigration","24":"tag-inflation","25":"tag-ireland","26":"tag-labor","27":"tag-markets","28":"tag-migration","29":"tag-political-economy","30":"tag-resilience","31":"tag-spain","32":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}