Immigrant versus Natives? Displacement and Job Creation

Ozden, Caglar ; Wagner, Mathis

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    AGE CATEGORIES;    AGE GROUP;    AGE GROUPS;    AGRICULTURE;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-6900
RP-ID  :  WPS6900

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

The impact of immigration on nativeworkers is driven by two countervailing forces: the degreeof substitutability between natives and immigrants, and theincreased demand for native workers as immigrants reduce thecost of production and output expands. The literature so farhas focused on the former substitution effect, whileignoring the latter scale effect. This paper estimates bothof these effects using labor force survey data from Malaysia(1990-2010), a country uniquely suited for understanding theimpact of low-skilled immigration. The instrumental variableestimates imply that the elasticity of labor demand (3.4) isgreater than the elasticity of substitution between nativesand immigrants (2.5). On average the scale effect outweighsthe substitution effect. For every ten additionalimmigrants, employment of native workers increases by 4.1 ina local labor market. These large reallocation effects areaccompanied by negligible relative wage changes. At thenational level, a 10 percent increase in immigrants,equivalent to 1 percent increase in labor force, has a smallpositive effect on native wages (0.14 percent). The impactof immigration is highly heterogeneous for natives withdifferent levels of education, resulting in substantialchanges in skill premiums and hence inequality. Immigrantson net displace natives with at most primary education;while primarily benefiting those with a little moreeducation, lower secondary or completed secondary education.