Malta: 2020 Selected Issues

April 10, 2020

Preview Citation

Format: Chicago

Malta: 2020 Selected Issues, (USA: International Monetary Fund, 2020) accessed December 21, 2024

Summary

This Selected Issues paper analyses immigration and the labor market in Malta. This paper finds that immigration has been positive for Malta, as it has helped boost growth, employment, productivity and incomes. The increased availability of foreign labor has also helped contain wage inflation (and hence probably also price inflation) in recent years, contributing to maintain competitiveness in the face of a booming economy. The results suggest that foreign workers have helped contain aggregate wage inflation. The baseline regression includes as regressors the headline unemployment rate, lagged core inflation, labor productivity growth, the share of foreign workers in total employment, and the first and fourth lags of the dependent variable. The results across some selected models suggest that foreign labor has helped contain wage inflation in recent years. In order to identify the drivers of nominal wage growth, a decomposition analysis is conducted which allows calculating the contributions of each of the independent variables included in the regressions.

Subject: Employment, Labor, Labor markets, Labor supply, Migration, Population and demographics, Wages

Keywords: CR, Employment, EU migrant, Foreign worker, Global, IMF staff calculation, ISCR, Labor markets, Labor supply, Malta, Migrant, Migration, Migration share, Real wage, Share, Wage growth, Wage inflation, Wages, Worker, Workers from the EU

Publication Details

Pages:

15
Volume:

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DOI:

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Issue:

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Series:

Country Report No. 2020/099
Stock No:

1MLTEA2020002
ISBN:

9781513540122
ISSN:

1934-7685

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