On the long-run relationship between immigration and growth: empirical evidence from European countries

This paper has a main ambition. It evaluates the impact of immigration on GDP per worker for ten European countries in order to fill the gap with numerous studies focusing on variables other than growth (wages, unemployment, innovation or public finances). We show that there is no obvious relationship between growth and immigration for a majority of economies. It is only when we allow for the possibility of structural breaks that we find the existence of cointegration between the two variables for six countries. Moreover, our results suggest that the impact of immigration remains rather modest on average.