German Jobs Mystery Explained as Refugees Hide in Statistics
- Training keeps some migrants off jobless register for years
- Others are making up for decline in working-age population
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More than 1 million refugees later, German unemployment is still falling.
Europe’s largest economy is defying concerns that the mass arrival of people from war-torn countries including Syria and Iraq over the past two years would lift joblessness and hurt growth. Instead, labor is the tightest in more than a quarter of a century and output increased in 2016 at the fastest pace in five years, bolstered by private consumption and government expenditure on migrants.