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":369666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5174],"tags":[331,6725,472,2437,68102,3374,35,2000,299,5187,20327,39,1824,1195,40,476,8175,2441,6657,129321,8720,104,49],"class_list":{"0":"post-369665","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-eu","8":"tag-banks","9":"tag-central-banks","10":"tag-christine-lagarde","11":"tag-companies","12":"tag-demographics","13":"tag-employment","14":"tag-energy","15":"tag-eu","16":"tag-europe","17":"tag-european","18":"tag-eurozone","19":"tag-fuels","20":"tag-germany","21":"tag-growth","22":"tag-immigration","23":"tag-inflation","24":"tag-labor","25":"tag-markets","26":"tag-migration","27":"tag-political-economy","28":"tag-resilience","29":"tag-spain","30":"tag-united-states"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115083635816083074","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}