Roundup: Managed migration can provide EU with economic opportunity: EIB

If well integrated, the massive migrant flows to Europe could provide sound economic opportunities as they will shore up the labor market of the aging continent, the European Investment Bank (EIB) said Wednesday.

If properly managed, migration represents an economic opportunity for Europe in the long run, EIB said in a report published on its website. Even in the short to medium term, economic costs of migration are likely to be small, or outweighed by the benefits, it added.

The EIB held the view that "without sustained migration inflows, the growth challenges for Europe would be much more complicated."

EU authorities have concluded that the refugee and overall migrant flows to Europe are not that economically costly.

A recent assessment carried out by the EU's executive arm, the European Commission, showed that fiscal costs were "limited, temporary" and could be easily outweighed by the benefits of integration in the medium run.

The findings concur with those of the International Monetary Fund, which said the fiscal costs would be 0.1 percent of European gross domestic product (GDP) per year between 2015 and 2017, but with EU GDP increasing by 0.13 percent above the baseline by 2017.

The migrants, the majority of whom are young, can help reduce the bloc's labor shortages and thereby partially compensate for insufficient intra-EU mobility.

Some economists have long insisted that migration can help counterbalance the drag of an aging society and support the bloc's economic growth which is now on a recovery track but still sluggish.

"There is significant evidence suggesting that Europe could increase its competitiveness by better use of human capital in order to improve its growth potential," the EIB said.

"To help sustain economic growth in line with historic trends under current demographic projections, Europe would need to attract a significant additional number of migrants," the bank said.

The EIB stressed that migration's cultural and social impacts could go well beyond the economic aspect and costs of non-integration would be high.

"Without an efficient integration of migrants, GDP per capita might actually decline in the next few years and unemployment rate might rise," it said.

Europe is experiencing the worst migrant crisis since the Second World War.

Since the start of the year, a total of 173,761 refugees and migrants reached European soil by sea, the International Organization for Migration reported Tuesday.

Last year, an estimated 1 million migrants arrived in Europe, accounting for the record number of 1.82 million detections of illegal border crossings reported by EU member states, more than six times the previous record set in 2014, according to Frontex, the EU's external border force.

The number of asylum applications in 2015 rose to an unprecedented level of 1.35 million, said the European Asylum Support Office. Endit