Why Germany’s jobless figure drops despite inflow of a million war refugees
Frankfurt — Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is defying concern that the two-year exodus of war refugees from countries such as Syria and Iraq would aggravate joblessness and hit growth. Instead, labour is at its tightest in more than a quarter of a century, and output rose in 2016 at its fastest pace in five years, bolstered by private consumption and government spending on migrants. The resilience masks some of a sophisticated labour market’s challenges in absorbing foreign workers when they lack qualifications and speak other languages. Integrating them is a test for Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose refugee policy US president-elect Donald Trump says is "catastrophic". Any setbacks threaten to turn Merkel’s bid for a fourth term this year into a vote on her immigration policy. "What surprises a lot of people is that you have a million people coming to Germany, yet you don’t see anything in unemployment," said Raimund Becker, a board member at the Federal Labour Agency in Nurembe...
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