For decades – in fact going back to the 19th century – business groups in New Zealand have claimed that we need lots of immigration (often even more immigration) to relieve pressing skill shortages. No one ever seems to ask them how other countries – which typically have nowhere near as much immigration as we do – manage to survive and prosper, but set that to one side for now.
Sometimes the alleged skill shortages relate to really highly-skilled positions. I don’t suppose anyone is going to have a problem if DHBs manage to recruit the odd paediatric oncologist from abroad. But more commonly the calls relate to the sorts of jobs that require considerably less advanced skills. In generations past the call was for more domestic servants – colonial girls were apparently reluctant to take on such roles, at least at the sorts of wages that middle New Zealand wanted to offer. These days…….well, we all know the sorts of role firms claim they simply have to have immigrants for. Without them, the more florid suggest, the economy will topple over.
For an individual employer, those calls make a lot of sense. Each firm has to operate with the rest of the economy as it is. Faced with two potential employees of exactly the same quality, of course an employer will prefer the one who will work for less. And they’ll be keen to have the competition among potential employees, to keep down any pressure for higher wages. And if your firm couldn’t hire immigrants while your competitor could, your business might well be in some considerable strife. Moreover, if the whole pattern of the economy has adjusted to using large amounts of modestly-skilled immigrant labour, so that some sectors rely mainly on that labour, of course it will look to employers in those sectors as if the continuation of current policy is absolutely vital. Who, we are asked, will staff the rest homes otherwise? Or milk the cows?
Deprive an individual employer of the ability to hire modestly-skilled migrant labour, and the argument will stack up. But if we are thinking about immigration policy as a whole we need to take a macroeconomic, whole of economy, perspective. And then the perspective, or experience, of an individual employer is largely irrelevant. With a materially different immigration policy, much about the economy will be different, not just the ability of that individual firm to hire a particular immigrant.
This isn’t some striking new perspective. New Zealand economists were saying it decades ago, responding to exactly the same sort of business sector claims. Mostly the response consisted of pointing out two things, both of which really should be obvious but seem to repeatedly get lost in the “our business needs more migrants” rhetoric:
- migrants aren’t just producers (sources of labour supply) but consumers, and someone else has to produce the stuff they want to consume, and
- in a modern economy each new person generates a need for quite a lot of additional capital (a place to live, roads, schools, hospitals, shops etc) and someone else has to produce and put in place that capital.
In other words, whatever beneficial impact an individual migrant may seem to have at the level of the individual firm, there is little reason to suppose that in aggregate high rates of immigration will do anything at all to ease so-called “skill shortages” or “labour constraints”. In fact, mostly the claim was rather the reverse: big migration inflows temporarily exacerbate those pressures across the economy as a whole.
I’ve written previously about Professor Horace Belshaw’s contribution to the immigration debate as long ago as 1952, as the post-war immigration wave was getting into full swing. Belshaw was, at a time, one of our leading macroeconomists. He noted
At the time when there are more vacancies than workers, it is natural to assume that immigration will relieve the labour shortage. This however, is a superficial view. The immigrants are not only producers but also consumers. To relieve the shortage of labour it would be necessary for more to be contributed to the production of consumer goods or of export commodities used to buy imported goods than the increased numbers withdraw in consumption. That is unlikely….[and] there will be some temporary net additional pressure on consumption.
and
Of much greater importance is the fact that each immigrant requires substantial additional capital investment, not in money but in real things. Houses and additional accommodation in schools and hospitals will be needed. In order to maintain existing production and services, and even more to maximize production per head, there must be more investment in manufacturing and farming, transport, hydro-electric power, municipal amenities and so on.
To anticipate a little, immigration is not likely to ease the labour shortage while it is occurring, and is more likely to increase it because although additional consumers are brought in, more labour than they provide must be diverted to creating capital if the ratio of capital to production is to be maintained.
A few years later, the Reserve Bank published an article in its Bulletin (April 1961) on “Economic Policy for New Zealand” by a visiting British academic, who noted
It is an illusion to assume that inflationary pressure and labour shortage can be relieved by increased immigration….the main immediate effect of increased immigration is to add to the shortage of capital goods. Even single men need to be housed, and they need capital equipment with which to work in industry…..Resources have to be devoted to providing this capital that could otherwise have been devoted to increasing and modernising capital equipment per man employed.
A few years later, another leading New Zealand economist, Frank (later Sir Frank) Holmes – Belshaw’s successor as McCarthy Professor of Economics at Victoria – published a series of articles on immigration for the NZIER. I could quote from him at length, but suffice to say he was convinced that in the short-term the demand effects (including for additional labour) from increased immigration outweighed, by some considerable margin, the supply effects. And here “short-term” didn’t mean a month or two. In fact, he quoted from some recent estimates by the Monetary and Economic Council – the Productivity Commission of its time – suggesting the additional excess demand would last for up to five years.
Or, a few years on, a quote from economic historian Professor Gary Hawke
Ironically, the success with which full employment was pursued until the late 1960s led to frequent claims that labour was in short supply so that more immigrants were desirable. The output of an individual industrialist might indeed have been constrained by the unavailability of labour so that more migrants would have been beneficial to the firm, especially if the costs of migration could be shifted to taxpayers generally through government subsidies. But migrants also demanded goods and services, especially if they arrived in family groups or formed households soon after arrival and so required housing and social services such as schools and health services. The economy as a whole then remained just as “short of labour” after their arrival.”
This sort of conclusion wasn’t even very controversial among economists. Whatever the possible longer-term merits of high immigration – and on that point views did differ – no serious analyst saw it as a way to relieve labour market pressures or deal with other excess demand pressures. It simply didn’t.
For 15 years there wasn’t very much immigration to New Zealand and in the process this knowledge seemed to have been largely lost. But the character of the economy didn’t really change, let alone the basic propositions that (a) migrants are consumers too, and (b) more people requires the accumulation of materially more physical capital. At the Reserve Bank it took us a while to wake up to this, in the face of first big post-liberalisation surge in immigration in the mid 1990s, but thereafter it became established wisdom for us. Consistent with this was a piece of research the Bank published just a few years ago. In that paper Chris McDonald looked at the impact of a one per cent lift in the population from net migration on, in this chart, the output gap (the estimated difference between actual GDP and the economy’s productive potential).
On this estimate, unexpected changes in migration increase the excess demand pressures on the New Zealand economy. The dark blue line is the central estimate, while the lighter lines represent confidence intervals around that central estimate. Coincidentally – see the Monetary and Economic Council estimates from earlier decades – on this model it takes five years (60 months) for the excess demand effects to fully dissipate. Over that time, on this model, immigration will be exacerbating aggregate labour market pressures, not relieving them.
I don’t want to put too much weight on any particular model estimates, and the Reserve Bank itself has tried to back away from this particular one. What causes the change in immigration matters to some extent. But the general conclusion – immigration does not ease resource pressures – shouldn’t be controversial. Indeed, only a few months ago some IMF modelling on New Zealand’s experience again produced similar results.
None of this should be a surprise (including to economically literate officials advising ministers). As I noted earlier there are two strands through which immigrants add to demand. The first is consumption. The household savings rate in New Zealand is roughly zero: on average, people consume what they earn. Perhaps the typical (or marginal) migrant is different – some will be sending remittances back to their homelands – but even if we assume that new immigrants have hugely different behaviour than New Zealanders, perhaps consuming equal to only 80 per cent of income, it is still a significant boost to demand. In effect, much of what the immigrants produce will be consumed by them (not exactly the same stuff, but across the economy as a whole). That is no criticism of them – people do what people do – but it is the first leg in the story about why claims that immigration eases labour shortages are typically simply false.
But the much more important part of the story is the capital requirements that new people (migrants or natives) generate. Here Statistics New Zealand’s capital stock data can help us. The latest estimates of the net capital stock (ie net, as in depreciated, and excluding land) are around $750 billion. Total GDP is around $250 billion. That ratio of net capital stock to GDP has been pretty stable around 3 for decades.
Each dollar of additional GDP seems to require three dollars of new capital. And this ratio understates the issue for two reasons:
- the first is that the capital stock is a net (depreciated) figure and the GDP is gross (it includes capital spending to cover depreciation – around 15 per cent of GDP), and
- the second is that our focus is here on the contribution of labour. The ratio of the net capital stock to compensation of employees (the national accounts measure of total labour earnings) is almost 7.
These are average numbers of course, and in discussing immigration the focus should be on the margin. It might be reasonable to point out that the typical migrant won’t need much more government capital in the short-term (eg schools and hospitals) – but then central government makes up only around a sixth of the total capital stock. Perhaps the typical migrant, at least their early years, will settle for less good quality housing than the typical native? But on the other hand, the productivity of the typical migrant is also likely to be lower than the national average, again at least in the early years (MBIE’s own labour market research highlights how long it takes many migrants to reach the earnings of similarly qualified locals). So I’m not here to give you a definitive number for how much new capital spending is typically going to be associated with each new migrant, but it will be large. It will be a significant multiple of the first year’s labour supply of the typical new migrant. It will, in other words, for several years exacerbate any aggregate shortages of labour, not relieve them.
Of course, quite a bit of physical capital is imported. All those earlier estimates already, explicitly or implicitly, take those imports into account. SNZ’s input-output tables suggest that across capital formation as a whole the import component isn’t high – around 21 per cent in 2013. That shouldn’t be surprising. Buildings make more than half the physical capital stock, and although they have some imported components, there is a great deal of domestic labour (and domestically produced timber and concrete). Accommodating more people simply adds greatly to the demand for employment over the first few years after they arrive.
Commentators and politicians who argue that migrants don’t take jobs away from New Zealanders are largely correct (again, past modelling exercises confirm that sort of intuition). They don’t do so – and they don’t succeed in lowering aggregate wages – precisely because influxes of immigration (or unexpected reductions in the net outflow of New Zealanders) add to demand – for goods and services, but thus for labour – more than they add to supply. There are probably some sector-specific adverse wage effects – in sectors where immigrant labour has been made particularly readily available – but much the bigger determinant of overall real wage prospects in New Zealand is productivity growth. Sadly, our record on that score over many decades has been poor. Over the last five years it has been shocking – no labour productivity growth at all. That, in turn, may be in part because of the effects of rapid population growth – all that spending associated with more people crowding out (notably through a high exchange rate) activities that might have offered more productivity growth prospects. Despite the political rhetoric to the contrary, there is no surprise that more people create more jobs – always have, probably always will. But there is also no surprise that as it was decades ago, is now, and probably ever will be, increased immigration doesn’t ease overall labour market pressures.
So too much of the New Zealand debate is simply misplaced. If we want to deal with domestic unemployment, as we should, look to monetary policy (it was a point Frank Holmes made 50 years ago). In the current context, hire a Governor who will take seriously the ambition of non-inflationary full employment. If there are sectoral market pressures, let wages in those sectors adjust – that is what happens to tomato prices when tomatoes are in short supply. And if we were serious about wanting sustained productivity growth – as we should be – it increasingly looks as though much lower levels of non-citizen migration would be the way to go.
On our woeful productivity performance, even the Reserve Bank is starting to openly recognise the issue. This chart (using their estimate of TFP) was in the chief economist’s speech this morning
Figure 3: Potential GDP Growth
Source: RBNZ estimates.
Little investment – as the Deputy Governor noted in his speech last week – and almost no productivity growth, and simply lots and lots more people. To what end – beneficial to the average New Zealander – one might reasonably wonder?
croaking cassandra 
Having school-leavers study science and engineering rather than accounting and law would increase productivity above what it would have been.
Switching the tax system from taxing expenditure rather than taxing income would be a good way to ensure that we have fewer jobs for accountants and tax lawyers, and more engineers and scientists in the workforce.
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I’m generally sympathetic to a (progressive) expenditure tax approach, but….I’m not sure it would lead to many fewer accountants and tax lawyers. The devil is often in the detail (and the political incentives for carve-outs etc as quite strong).
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GST is a tax on expenditure at a rather high 15%. very high compared to Australia’s 10%. That GST tax on expenditure has actually created more work for Accountants and lawyers rather than less especially the zero rated regime for land transactions.
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Regarding the output gap chart: I suspect Ministers like immigration because it ensures demand even when the central bank isn’t doing a very good job.
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In the current circumstances there might be some truth to that. of course, at the time of the last big immigration surge (early 00s) we had mon policy too loose (something the Bank has now acknowledged).
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Monetary Policy has never been too loose in NZ. We have consistently run at interest rates higher than most of our global trading partners. This has kept or NZD higher than it needs to be which made imports more attractive than manufacturing in NZ.
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And here i will refer you to the RB model: our neutral interest rate has been well above neutral interest rates in other countries for many years. But our interest rates have been well below the consensus view of our neutral for prolonged periods – eg from late 2001 to 2005/06
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Another really useful column. Thank you for bringing this research and analysis over 60 years together in one place, a great service.
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With this evidence, we need an intelligent politician (oxymoron?) to develop the conversation among the sheeple.
A bit late for this election, I fear.
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This lot of politicians won’t even seriously criticise a confessed benefit fraudster in their midst – not one key figure in a major party (Nat, Lab, NZF, or Greens) has yet called for an apology, let alone a resignation – so I’m not expecting much willingness/capability to engage with serious structural economic failing.
(But I’m in a sweep the place – Parliament – clean mood, albeit then with no one left to vote for!)
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Preferred slogan is “drain the swamp”
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Yes, but another distasteful swamp-dweller, in another country, already got hold of that wording!
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Ethically, I think Bill English did far worse, and he took a lot more. Rather than following the advice of Jesus on who should be casting the first stone, I expect they were following the proverbial advice given to people who live in glass houses.
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I guess Shane Jones’s incurring personal expenditure like underwear costs on his taxpayer credit card is small potatoes compared to a self confessed fraudster that leads the Green party. She should be jailed.
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Well, the authorities seem to have taken the opposite view in recent times, and they point to the very low level of wage growth as evidence. Bernard Hickey tweeted this morning that Treasury forecast 215k new jobs in next 4.5 years and net migration of 214k, with real wage growth of 0.6% (not annualised). It all makes perfect sense if you have an investment property.
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Not sure what he tweeted but his article says the TSY forecast is for 150,000 new jobs and net immigration of 212,000 over the next four years (see last paragraph);
https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2017/07/25/39964/a-toxic-mix-of-low-wage-growth-and-fast-rising-rents
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Shouldn’t a PM who has worked in Treasury and over the last 30 years worked with all the major Wellington public services that study these sort of economic factors be better informed about the effects of immigration?
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He has been exposed to all the arguments. I don’t know why he seems convinced of the status quo on this count.
My impression of the man more generally is of someone who lacks the courage of his convictions, and ends up largely running with the pack. I can’t believe, for example, that he is the sort of person who, deep down, really thinks it is ok for Todd Barclay not to have cooperated with the Police.
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I don’t see him as a person with any ‘convictions’ – he’s not in it for the country but rather for himself/his family;
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/2910957/Bill-English-buckles-over-housing-allowance
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At a meeting of U3A earlier this month Prof Paul Spoonley gave a short lecture about demographics. Among other things he said that Chinese immigrants were businessmen and they brought money into NZ and that we should all be grateful. Whether true or not I do remember bringing almost a million dollars when I obtained residency in 2003. In fact I was surprised when I discovered that the $200,000 needed to achieve the immigration point count was actually mine to keep not a payment to the NZ IRD.
My question is what is the effect of an immigrant bringing in money?
Does their currency exchange tend to increase the value of the NZ$ allowing other Kiwis to buy import items at a better price? And if so does it correspondingly handicap exporters? Then if I spend my money isn’t that increasing demand as you describe which ought to help mop up the unemployed and thus increase demand for skilled workers etc. At this point if there are no more immigrants then wages would increase. Or we have our current predicament with ever increasing numbers of immigrants needed..
It just feels odd that a young graduate with debts to the agents who placed him in NZ might be a better immigrant to NZ than say Peter Thiel if he decided to reside among his fellow Kiwis?
Maybe I’ve argued myself to the position where what is good for employers of labour is not what is good for residents of NZ. Hopefully someone will clarify because my head hurts.
Meanwhile I will cogitate on ‘aggregate wages’; probably I will find immigration holding down the labour cost for computer programming (and I didn’t mind earning less than I could in the UK) which is good for NZ and also holding down casual labor rates (fast food, building labourer, shop assistant etc) which will be a kick in the teeth of some of my family. You can produce as many elegant convincing economic arguments as you like but family comes first.
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….not to mention the possible adverse impact on the quality of local fish and chips! when Michael throws down some economic googlies, I often use this link to help out (just in case of interest – a cracking free resource I think):
https://www.fedinprint.org/subjects.html
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I was surprised to find that they even had a “New Zealand” subject tag, with lots of entries – just none since 2000
https://www.fedinprint.org/subjects/newzealand.html
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..”unexpected changes”; yup, seems the wider impact should have been anticipated and I guess the problems of not having a well thought through long term policy framework relating to population growth and housing / infrastructure needs are currently flashing red; that said, I do recall the “brain drain” concern of the mid ‘90s which now seems somewhat hazy – maybe that will come back again….or maybe “drain the swamp” applies here as well
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I don’t have a problem with most of what you’ve said, but I recognised at least one small detail that those on the other side of the debate would put differently. That is how much immigrants earn/save/consume. I believe a cross-section of immigrants is different to that of the general population, fewer children and retired people, with consequent differences in how much they earn/save/consume.
With regards the 7x spending on capital, does that mean that, assuming a lot of things, for 1% net immigration, something like 7% of GDP is going into the capital requirements of those people?
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The fewer children may be the opposite after say a decade and could well be related to cultural. For example with no evidence I assert the typical PI immigrant will have more children than an average NZ family and will do so for one or two generations. And I expect young Brits and Aussies may well be attracted to NZ as a place that is good for children (ignoring suicides and poverty and ill-treatment) with a healthy climate, plenty of public open spaces and safe and reasonably effective schools.,
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Of course, employers at the individual firm level can have a much more enthusiastic view of immigration because they don’t have to provide infrastructure, roads, water, schools, hospitals, housing
However, unless something is done fairly soon, the time is rapidly looming where employers will have to sweeten the pot (in Auckland) by providing subsidised housing. Already happening in the secondary school system
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How about adopting an idea from another country. In PNG employers of foreign workers had to pay a fee (it was either annual or every 3 years not sure which) and I think it was roughly equivalent to the annual salary offered to a new graduate. It helped finance the government.
At present their is an extra tax on employment in the employers contribution to Kiwisaver. Couldn’t something similar work for employing those on work visas? Set it was set high enough it would be an incentive to employ unemployed Kiwis first.
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Wrong,wrong wrong.!!
You are reaching the wrong conclusions from your historical data.
You are assuming the past is repeating in the present! Wrong there is no evidence to support this argument.
In fact I reckon we could go to 100,000 net inflow and run that for at least 5 years.
In the past we have restricted immigration or brought the wrong people in, eg 1970’s from the islands.
Our economy is booming. Where is the food inflation, where is general inflation, which would indicate the stresses you claim are happening, nowhere to be seen , only housing and that is a result of previous poor political decisions.
We have always had poor productivity due to poor or wrong measures and because of our geographical isolation. In fact some economists are claiming now that productivity measure are irrelevant. (Read Paul Kirby site).
I love immigrants, I love the excitement and dynamism they bring to our society and economy, its like we are wakening up from a 75 year slumber!
Read this from KiwiBlog (David Farrar)
“66 more jobs an hour
The other day I heard the Prime Minister say that in the last year the New Zealand economy created an extra 10,000 jobs a month.
This sounded far fetched to me. I knew we had reasonable job growth but surely not 10,000 a month. So I checked and indeed the Prime Minister was wrong.
In fact the job growth was 11,500 a month!
In March 2016 there were 2,402,000 in employment and in March 2017 there were 2,539,000. And 81% of the new jobs were full-time.
That is:
•137,000 net new jobs in 12 months
•11,500 new jobs a month
•2,600 new jobs a week
•66 new jobs per working hour (40/week)
So think about this. You attend a one hour meeting. By the end of that meeting, there would have been (on average) 66 more jobs than at the start of the meeting.
For a country with such a small population, 11,500 new jobs a month is remarkable. That is the equivalent of the US growing by 800,000 jobs a month.
As a percentage that is a 5.7% increase in the number of jobs in a year. Here’s the growth rate for jobs for some other countries:
1.NZ 5.7%
2.Germany 2.9%
3.Ireland 2.9%
4.US 1.8%
5.OECD 1.6%
6.Australia 1.6%
7.Sweden 1.5%
8.UK 1.4%
9.Canada 0.7%
10.France 0.6%
11.Finland 0.5%
Well done NZ11
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I’m not going to attempt a detailed response (altho i disagree almost entirely), but do be aware that the 5.7% number is distorted by a significant break in the HLFS series (when the next HLFS data comes out next month the break effect will drop out of the APCs).
On the “where is the inflation”, it is of course restrained by interest rates that are still 150bps or more higher than those in most other advanced economies, esp the ones that don’t have rapid population growth. Those interest rates keep on skewing our economy away from the tradables sector, exacerbating the problems that distance creates for us anyway.
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Ross: with a Melanesian PI wife and her children and now grandchildren I get all the excitement I need.
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I think it matters what sort of jobs they are too. Are they full-time? How many are so poorly paid they have to be subsidised by WFF and accommodation supplements?
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No inflation is restrained by a large over production or supply of goods and services as a result of previous interest rate policy. (2008) Interest rates are having little or no effect in the “real” world only on asset price appreciation, like world sharemarkets
Of course some house price inflation, in the real world, in a number of cities is caused by money fleeing China.
The Paul Kirby site has a lot of interesting graphs on immigration. They are not his, but OECD.
The one were NZ virtually leads the world on immigration integration is of course very interesting.
You need to scroll down to find them.
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Does the argument change at all for immigrants going to parts of the country where the population is declining or stable?
Even Winston Peters is now saying “don’t shut out the farming migrants”. I liked your post here – I think, very well argued and persuasive, but does it apply equally to immigrants moving to communities that might actually have more infrastructure (school buildings, commercial services, roads) than they now need due to a decline in population in those areas?
This was something I thought about after listening to the Massey University podcast on immigration. They had someone on there from Invercargill or somewhere saying “these new immigrants are great, we can keep our schools open!”.
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It is easy to understand why declining communities will be keen to attract people – eg schools and medical services. It isn’t always wise – Taihape has many fewer people than it once did, and if that is sad in a way, it also mostly reflects the declining opportunities in that location.
But if dairy in Southland is more economic than sheep, and is more labour intensive, then it is likely to be a good thing for the region to attract more workers. But there is no reason why those people couldn’t be NZers – after all, almost all the dairy workers 30 years will have been (same with eg rest home workers). Cut back overall immigration, and interest and exchange rates will fall. Farmers will then be better able to bid aggressively for local labour to do what are dirty and quite demanding jobs (and there will be people currently employed servicing rampant population growth looking for work in other sectors). (As I’ve noted previously, it also becomes easier to impose the sort of high water quality stds, and even taxes on methane emissions) that many are calling for).
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To clarify, I didn’t mean to take the bleeding-heart “we have to keep our charming small kiwi towns going” angle.
The point is that your output gap graph might look different if it’s applied to regions where you don’t need the same upfront capital investment to accommodate new migrants. In Auckland, yeah, you have to build new roads and rail carriages and schools and so on just to keep up with the growth. In (say) Southland, if the local school’s role declined from 150 to 50 in the last 30 years and the traffic has declined, then you won’t need to build any new schools if you can hire an extra teacher and re-open a closed classroom.
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Ok, I see what you mean. Yes, it will be a little different then, altho the plausible scale (without putting material pressure on the existing capital stock) is likely to be quite small. A few thousand here and a few thousand there at maximum, but over 5 years we give residence visas to 225000 people.
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