Scarcity of qualified workers undermines German growth: study

BERLIN, April 16 (Xinhua) -- A scarcity of qualified workers in the German labor market is undermining the country's economic momentum, a study by the Institute for the German Economy (IW) showed on Monday.

According to IW, around 444,000 positions for qualified workers are currently vacant.

"German economic growth would be up to 0.9 percent or around 30 billion euros (37.14 billion U.S. dollars) higher if companies could satisfy this unstilled demand for qualified workers," a statement by the Cologne-based institute read.

The figure was based on an independent interpretation by the IW of official data from the Federal Labor Office (BA). Although officially non-partisan, IW is widely seen as an institute whose findings generally support the views of business leaders and industry associations.

The study described labor market bottlenecks as an important reason for low corporate investment rates and difficulties in meeting high consumer demand with existing productive capacities. "Even if firms could hire every adequately-skilled unemployed person in Germany, vacant positions for highly-skilled personnel would remain," the authors argued.

In spite of a damaging scarcity of skilled labor, the study predicted that gross domestic product (GDP) in Germany would grow by around two percent in 2018 and 2019 thanks to lasting global demand for German exports. The newly-formed "grand coalition" government has vowed to make Germany more attractive to highly-skilled immigration in order to alleviate economic pressures on businesses that created the country's record low unemployment rate. Enditem