With immigration hawks on the rise, the bloc’s tech champions sound the alarm when it comes to recruiting expat workers.
The far right’s recent gains in Europe could be industry’s loss when it comes to recruiting skilled foreign workers.
Leading companies in industrial strongholds such as Germany and the Netherlands — active in areas such as microchip manufacturing — are increasingly worried that anti-immigration policies could make it harder for them to hire the expat workers they need to fill their many boom-driven vacancies.
The companies’ message: Don’t block our ability to tap foreign workers, or it will hamper growth.
Microchip manufacturing, essential for producing everything from cars to smartphones, is poised for rapid expansion in the next few years, especially in already established hubs in Europe, like the greater Eindhoven region in the Netherlands or Dresden in eastern Germany.
Companies in the sector claim that Europe’s demographics and young people’s study preferences mean they can’t rely solely on homegrown talent to meet their employment needs.
You really shouldn’t use Japan as an example for anything economic, they’re overworked, unable to support elder care, and deeply in debt. The reason for the negative interest rates was to avoid defaulting on their bonds.
A country can’t default on bonds to its self. It doesn’t make sense, and out of all the countries in the world the US owes Japan more money than anyone else.
No country on earth has ever gone into hyper inflation due to owing it’s self, there has always been an external force draining it of money… This was not the case with Japan, and so the situation continued for three decades and is called a miracle.
So Japan is deeply in debt but theoretically stable… They’re in a hole and don’t appear to be sinking deeper but it’s anyone’s guess how they’ll ever dig themselves out of the whole - with modest inflation they can keep themselves stable but high inflation will cause their government into an untenable position. Their debt (as of March 2023) was 263% of GDP - that’s an insane amount of debt.
Roughly the same as Argentina but accumulated over a much larger time period.
Of course as a nominal figure I suspect American debt is larger (eg. in name or denomination value, not as a percentage of GDP).
However this will only be a problem for Argentina, as America and Japan are sovereign currencies, mostly in debt to themselves. The main risk of their position is lending downgrades, and buying power downgrades, but they probably won’t matter all that much in any defacto sense.
I agree there are countries in far worse positions but the Japanese debt is rough unless MMT is assumed fully correct and Japan is considered under the cloak of US power projection. Even with those assumptions Japan is in a terrible place for issuing new debt.