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How much will immigration help European fiscal problems?

Martin Feldstein thinks not so much:

The ageing of the population presents a major fiscal challenge for the countries of Europe.  The combination of increased longevity and a reduced birth rate will directly reduce the growth rates of the European economies by slowing the growth of the capital stock and by weakening the productivity of the labor force.  This slower growth of GDP means a smaller tax base and less tax revenue.  In addition, the current tax-financed systems of social pensions and health care will require substantial increases in the already high tax rates.  The analysis in this paper shows that the common prescription of increased immigration would do little to reduce the future fiscal burden.  The increased revenue from a large rise in immigration would finance only a small part of the coming rise in the cost of pension and health benefits.  The only alternative to significantly higher tax rates or substantially lower retirement income is to shift from a pure tax-financed system to a mixed system that supplements the tax financed benefits with benefits based on increased saving financial investment.

Here is the paper.  I can't find a non-gated version, which might be because Feldstein runs the NBER...

Posted by Tyler Cowen on December 6, 2006 at 06:06 AM in Economics | Permalink

Comments

Immigration won't solve any of Europe's problems, because the kind of immigrants we lure into Europe are not high-skilled workers, but people who are interested in the idea of social welfare.
Germany is experiencing now the first backlash of its terrible immigration policy. It is incredible whacky to look at the results of its immigration policy, turning away high-skilled workers and academics, but instead having enough grey spots for people who don't want to work.

It's one of the reasons, why I argue that welfare states can never have an open border policy, because welfare systems tend to motivate the wrong kind of characteristica in probable immigrants.
It's just the incentive which is plain wrong and leads to a level of immigration that is to the disadvantage of europe.

Posted by: Max at Dec 6, 2006 3:27:10 PM

It also matters who your immigrants are.

In Britain, the Pakistanis are a net drain on the country largely because they are mostly descended from unskilled peasants. In contrast, the Indians appear to be a net positive on taxes paid minus government spending because they come from more middle class backgrounds.

France has imported a huge number of North Africans and West Africans, and how's that working out for them?

Life in the West often depletes human capital, so a sensible immigration policy starts with people with a lot of human capital.

Posted by: Steve Sailer at Dec 6, 2006 4:29:51 PM

As far as the UK's concerned, Steve's right - but even although the Bangladeshis manage to achieve even worse progress than the Pakistanis, it sometimes seems that the Somalis, a people from somewhere almost all of whom seem to be going nowhere, were created by God for no purpose other than to point out the benefits of immigration restriction.

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Posted by: john at Dec 13, 2006 1:45:20 AM

In Italy,politicians are attracting huge numbers of immigrants,at the same time trying to sell to the Italian public the idea that they will eventually finance the costly old-age pension system of Italy.

Nothing could be further from the truth: these masses of unskilled workers are on one side preventing Italian managers from finally dismissing obsolete and non-competitive sectors of the economy as they should have already done long ago; on the other hand thay are destroying the country's welfare system day after day,by taking much more from it then what they contribute to.

The politicians are aware of this,but their main concern is to grant immigrants the right to vote,thus securing -in their personal plan- political power for left wing coalitions for the near future,with the utmost disregard for the future of this country and of its future generations....

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