Abstract
From 2014 onwards Poland witnessed an unprecedented inflow of immigrant workers from Ukraine. Coupled with strong labour demand, this surge in labour supply provided a major contribution to Poland’s economic growth. However, due to problems with capturing immigration in Labour Force Survey data this contribution has remained hitherto largely unaccounted in official data. This paper uses a range of alternative official data sources to estimate the actual number of immigrants, and survey data on migrant characteristics, collected in four Polish cities, to estimate the effective labour supply of Ukrainian immigrants in terms of productivity-adjusted hours worked. The authors find that the arrival of Ukrainian workers was increasing the effective labour supply in Poland in 2013–2018 by 0.8% per annum. Imputing this additional labour supply in a growth accounting exercise they find that the (previously unaccounted) contribution of Ukrainian workers amounted to about 0.5 pp. per annum, i.e., about 13% of Poland’s GDP growth in 2013–2018. The same figure should be subtracted from the residual contribution of total factor productivity growth, suggesting that recent growth in Poland has been in fact much more labour-intensive than previously interpreted.
Highlights
We first present our estimates of the contribution of Ukrainian immigrants to the total labour supply in Poland in the baseline scenario, comparing it with a null scenario that disregards the labour of immigrant workers
Our baseline estimates of the labour input, which take into account both the quantity and productivity of hours worked, confirm a large positive impact of immigration from Ukraine on the total labour supply in Poland in 2013–2018 (Fig. 4, Table 5)
Decomposition of this result shows that the impact of the growing number of immigrant employees was important in the years 2014–2017 when it added 0.5–1.3 pp. to annual labour input growth in Poland (Fig. 5)
Summary
From that year onward Poland admitted probably between one and two million immigrants from Ukraine (Fig. 1).2 This wave of immigration, of an unprecedented scale in Poland’s modern history, was significant from the European perspective. A vast majority of Ukrainian immigrants arrived in Poland for economic reasons, and they immediately sought (and most of them found) employment here. Their immigration was prompted inter alia by strong labour demand, relatively easy short-term work and residence permits (pull factors) as well as the Russian aggression on Ukraine in 2014 with an ensuing economic crisis there (push factors). In contrast to migrants from Ukraine to Poland before 2014—less than 0.2 million of mostly temporary workers in the agricultural sector—the new immigrants located predominantly in cities and sought work across a broad spectrum of economic sectors
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