Integrating Recent Refugees into the Labour Market: The Action Net in Austria

Economic and Labour Market Impacts of Migration in Austria: An Agent-Based Modelling Approach

“…Third, we assume that the refugees in our model have immediate access to the labour market with similar transition probabilities as other migrants from non-EU countries with similar socio-economic characteristics. However, as highlighted by Jestl et al (2022), Bešić andOrtlieb (2023), andTverdostup (2023), this assumption does not fully align with the challenges faced by refugees in transitioning into the labour market and makes the migration scenario even more extreme which is useful for testing the resilience of the Austrian economy and labour market to large-scale migration shocks.…”

“…For instance, migration shocks can lead to an increase in unemployment among refugees in certain industries, such as agriculture, hospitality, other services, and healthcare. This can be caused by a lack of qualification recognition which often drives highly qualified migrants into these sectors resulting in unemployment and lowquality jobs (Bešić & Ortlieb, 2023;Ortlieb & Weiss, 2020). One of the reasons is that the current Austrian labour market landscape typically requires formal qualifications, which migrants may not have due to differing international standards (Wittfeld, 2019).…”

“…In 1995, when Austria became a member of the European Union, migration increased the share of EU citizens, especially from Germany (Goujon & Bauer, 2015). Among the recent migration waves, the most significant was in 2015, around the peak of the Syrian civil war, when 88,000 asylum primary policy objective (Bešić & Ortlieb, 2023). We adopt a macroeconomic approach to investigate the influence of immigrants on the economy of the host society, aligning with the broader examination of labour markets in the presence of migrants (Martin, 2022).…”