The Role of International Migration in the Changing European Labour Market

Abstract

In the first thirty years after the last war, the European economies enjoyed an unparalleled experience of economic growth. Even in the period from 1960 to 1974 after post-war reconstruction was well past, real GDP managed to grow by 90 per cent, and industrial activity by 103 per cent. This experience of rapid growth was shared by virtually all of the countries involved, the only important exception being the UK. In a statistical sense at least, this growth is largely to be accounted for in terms of a sustained improvement in labour productivity, but an essential factor in all the countries involved was a substantial growth in non-agricultural employment (Kindleberger, 1967). Adequate labour supply to meet the growing needs of European companies was secured by tapping four principal sources of labour reserves (Castles, 1984). Two of these were indigenous involving, on the one hand, the transfer into urban employment of rural labour surpluses, and, on the other, the mobilisation for paid employment of substantial numbers of women previously active only in the domestic economy. The third source to be exploited, particularly as domestic sources of male labour neared exhaustion, took the form of international migration of workers, starting with those displaced from Eastern Europe — who added 11 million to the West German population between 1939 and 1954 — but dominated from the early 1960s by flows from the peasant agricultural economies of southern Europe and the sometime colonies of European powers.