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IW study: Germany has seen a sharp decline in the working

2021-10-14T15:28:15.261Z


The aging of German society is progressing much faster than in most other EU countries. The German Economic Institute is calling for an offensive immigration policy.


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Pensioners in Berlin (archive picture)

Photo: BARBARA SAX / AFP

Many people will no longer be able to be replaced by younger employees after they retire: Without migration, the number of 20 to 64-year-olds in Germany will be around eleven percent lower in 2030 than in 2020, according to a study by the employer-related Institute of German Economy (IW).

On average in the EU, the decline is just under seven percent.

A decade without migration is not realistic, wrote the IW. However, the calculation shows how bad the German labor market is in a European comparison. Only Lithuania had an even worse value in a European comparison. For the study, the researchers evaluated figures from the European statistical authority Eurostat from 2019.

The problem becomes particularly clear when comparing the number of future pensioners and future offspring: At the beginning of 2020, for every 100 German citizens between the ages of 60 and 64, there were 82 people between the ages of 20 and 24.

For every 100 people of the younger generation between the ages of 55 and 59, there were only 59 young people between the ages of 15 and 19.

For every 100 people between the ages of 50 and 54, there were only 56 children and young people between the ages of ten and 14.

In the European average, the quotients were significantly higher, namely at 83, 74 and 72 people.

While Ireland performed best - the number of young people there was even higher than that of future retirees - there was a clear overall difference between south-east and north-west Europe.

The situation in the southeast is much more tense.

In Germany, the aging of the labor market has so far been mitigated by strong immigration, explained the IW.

"No other member state will be so dependent on immigration in the next few years as Germany."

Nevertheless, further measures are necessary - also to avoid an aging population in the EU countries from which migrant workers come to Germany particularly often.

"Even if a common policy of securing skilled workers at EU level is hardly conceivable, the member states must coordinate their handling of this one-sided east-west migration," says IW expert Wido Geis-Thöne.

ssu / AFP

Source: spiegel

All business articles on 2021-10-14

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