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":93010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[64,63,7105,99,5299,68817,10830,5923,164,181,2572,62336,19216,5717,208,9281,5465,1788,171,19931,68818,38475,2020,1055],"class_list":["post-93009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-banks","tag-business","tag-central-banks","tag-christine-lagarde","tag-companies","tag-demographics","tag-economy","tag-employment","tag-energy","tag-eurozone","tag-fuels","tag-germany","tag-growth","tag-immigration","tag-inflation","tag-labor","tag-markets","tag-migration","tag-political-economy","tag-resilience","tag-spain","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}