Our economies are failing to deliver higher living standards for most people – and many have lost faith in politicians’ ability to deliver a brighter future, with support for parties like UKIP and France’s Front National soaring. After the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and even with exceptional monetary support, the recovery is the flimsiest on record: the eurozone is sinking into deflation, while Britain is inflating yet another housing bubble. Read on...
I think we should make a distinction between 2 effects
RépondreSupprimer1. Accepting immigrants will increase the workforce who in the best scenario would find a job and pay taxes : The PIB will grow accordingly but the PIB per person has no reason to grow neither the productivity to increase (On the contrary, The newly created jobs are likely to be more manual and less capitalized at least in the short to medium term thus leading to a decrease in the average productivity.
2. Increasing productivity on the other side increases production with a constant level of workforce thus giving the possibility to increase the average standard of living. Whether it will actually increase this standard is linked to the redistribution system : it may happen that despite growth some may lose and others win (more or less what happened in the US in the last 20 years )
The central question is how to boost productivity ? and there is no consessus on the subject. There is presently a transition towards a digitalization / Robotization of economies but on average the productivity does not increase as much as it used to do during previous technological transitions (And this is not an European problem but overall worldwide). Productivity of emerging economies still benefit for a time of having to reach first the level of developped economy thus applying the transition towards a model which is already implementde in developped countries : electricity, mechanization, sanitation, etc. which create productivity gains.