Coppola Comment

It had to happen. Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, has refused to commit to a net migration target. Facing a barrage of complaints from the hospitality industry about potential staff shortages post-Brexit, Rudd appears to be softening the government's line.  She told BBC Radio 5Live's Pienaar's Politics: "My personal view is we need to continue to bring immigration down. I want to make sure that we do it in a way that supports businesses.” So what way might that be, then? After all, her boss is on record as saying she thinks net migration should fall to the tens of thousands. Currently, it is in the hundreds of thousands: according to the latest ONS statistics , net migration for 2016 was 273,000 (net inflow), of which 164,000 was from outside the EU. Even if immigration from the EU stopped completely after Brexit, it would not be enough to bring net migration down to levels Theresa May considers "sustainable". The UK would also have to impose much more d...

In the latest of his excellent reports for the BBC on the refugee crisis in Europe, Feargal Keene focuses on the plight of children. A baby, only a month old, makes the hazardous crossing from Turkey to the Greek island of Lesbos. Little children, freezing cold and wet through, climb the muddy path up from the beach. Volunteers from many nations provide food, blankets and medical care for these tiny lives. But Lesbos is only the start of their journey, And in Europe, it is winter . Across the continent, refugees - including many children and babies - huddle round camp fires at the borders, waiting to be admitted. But the signs are up everywhere. "No room....." At this time of year, Christians sing carols about a baby born in a stable, because there was no room in the inn. A baby born to a migrant mother, in freezing conditions in the middle of winter. "Behold a silly tender babe, in freezing winter night, in homely manger trembling lies. Alas, a piteous sight...

I am temporarily departing from my usual finance & economics slant to write about something that I consider utterly shameful: the response of European countries, including my own, to the refugee crisis on their borders. This photo was taken on the Macedonian border today: : Herbert Mayrhofr tweeted this with a comment, "This is not the Europe that I want to live in". I wholeheartedly agree. What kind of society is it that will threaten toddlers with police batons? Many argue that Europe cannot afford to accommodate the number of "migrants" currently streaming in. But the countries of the EU are by-and-large rich countries. They can always find resources for the things that are politically important. My own country found the resources to fight wars in Libya and Afghanistan - but apparently is now so poor that it must repel with razor wire and tear gas the refugees from the war zones it has created. What appallingly skewed priorities. Others say that ...

Germany is exporting people. Well, Eurozone countries exporting people is hardly news . But Germany isn't exporting the same sort of people as other Eurozone countries. Other countries are exporting their young and their skilled. Germany is exporting its old . Economically this makes complete sense. Germany has a lot of old people and a relative shortage of the young & skilled. So it imports young & skilled people and exports old ones. After all, exporting old people is surely better than killing them . There's nothing new about this, of course. Britain has been exporting old people for years. Relatively well-off pensioners like to retire to the sun after years of tolerating British weather. The southern countries of Europe contain substantial populations of expatriate Brits, many of them retired and living on savings. The economic collapse of the southern European states has taken its toll on them, of course: many British retirees in Cyprus lost substantial amoun...

The problem that I identified for the Eurozone in my previous posts is already well-documented on a smaller scale within countries - migration from rural areas to cities. And as various people have pointed out, we are also seeing it in the US and UK, which are currency unions. It's also a particularly worrying feature of the Baltic states  and other Eastern European members of the European Union. In short, it's not just a problem peculiar to the Eurozone. The theory behind free movement of labour runs as follows. Consider countries within an economic union  where there are no legal barriers to the movement of people. When a country undergoes internal devaluation which causes wages to fall and increases unemployment, the result is migration of the young, able and skilled to other countries where there is more work and higher wages. We can regard this as export of labour, and the countries receiving the migrants can be said to be importing labour.  We assume th...

I wrote a post the other day that caused something of a stir. In it I argued that migration of the young & skilled from southern European countries could mean that those left behind face a very bleak future. Several people took issue with this, arguing that the migrants would send back enough money to support their parents and regenerate the economy. This to my mind ignores current demographic reality, and perhaps more importantly, the particular structural problems in the Eurozone. And some people seemed unclear about my argument. So in this post, I shall explain the reasoning behind my bleak assessment of the future for the Eurozone periphery.  I am emphatically NOT arguing that there is anything intrinsically wrong with young, skilled people leaving in search of a better life elsewhere. Migration benefits both the migrants and the receiving countries. Immigration is a GOOD thing for countries that have ageing populations and skills shortages - as most Western countries ...

This chart shows the "slow train wreck" that is Eurozone youth unemployment - courtesy of Pedro da Costa of Reuters: (larger version here ) This adds up to an aggregate youth unemployment figure of 23.3% (in March 2013) for the Eurozone as a whole. This is what the European Commission plans to do about it : The Youth Employment Initiative was proposed by the 7-8 February 2013 European Council with a budget of €6 billion for the period 2014-20.  The Youth Employment Initiative would particularly  support young people not in education, employment or training  in the Union's regions with a youth unemployment rate in 2012 at above 25% by integrating them into the labour market. The money under the Youth Employment Initiative would therefore be used to reinforce and accelerate measures outlined in the December 2012  Youth Employment Package . In particular, the funds would be available for EU countries to finance measures to implement in...