A point on Spanish economic adjustment

Yesterday Edward Hugh wrote an intriguing passage:

Despite the fact that Spain’s unemployment rate is currently around 27% immigrants continue to arrive in the country (often risking their lives to do so), a fact which puzzled the Financial Times demography correspondent Norma Cohen when we spoke about this article. “Why on earth,” she asked me “would people want to come to Spain with such a high rate of unemployment?” Because salaries are better than in their home countries would be the simple answer, and because they are willing to do work which many Spaniards are reluctant to do, at least at the salaries which are on offer. So economic migrants continue to arrive, an estimated 300,000 of them last year, even though the net migrant flow reversed since more left (both native Spaniards and immigrants) with Spain’s population falling for the first time in modern history as a result.

One interpretation of this finding (not one that Hugh necessarily endorses) is thus.  Given the quality of its institutions, Spain is due for a lower wage structure, with lower quality jobs, as they might be perceived by the workers themselves.  To some extent, Spain will achieve this new equilibrium by population adjustment and exchange.  Spanish engineers will move to southern Germany and Ecuadorans will move to Spain.

Hugh’s post is mostly about Latvia, here is another interesting bit:

…three IMF economists (hereafter BGG) effectively signed off on their study of “what just happened on Latvia” and, they hoped, drew to a close a debate which has been going on now for some 6 years. In fact, far from closing the debate, what they may have done is effectively extend it into new terrain, since these apparently harmlesss words – “the recovery from the slump is largely complete” – have far reaching implications, as does the methodology they use for reaching it. These implications reach well beyond Latvia, and even far beyond the Baltics and the CEE in general, despite the conclusion that everyone seems to be reaching that Latvia was just a “one off”. Possibly without intending to do so, they have drawn onto the clinical investigation table issues which have been mounting  up in the theoretical lumber rooms of neoclassical growth theory for some time now, issues which begin to assume a paramount practical importance in the context of our rapidly ageing societies. What, for example, do we understand by the term “convergence” these days? And if “steady state” growth can no longer be understood as implying a constant growth rate (trend growth in developed economies is now systematically falling) should we be considering the possibility that headline GDP growth will at some point turn negative, even if GDP per capita may continue to rise, due to the fact that populations are steadily starting to shrink. And if the answer to the former question is “yes”, then what are the implications of this for the financial system, for the system of saving and borrowing, and for the sustainability of legacy debt? Not little questions these, but one which will need to find answers and responses in countries like Latvia over the next couple of decades.