German companies could generate an additional €49 billion ($52 billion) worth of goods and services in 2024 if they could meet their demands for skilled labour, according to a new study.
The addition of some 573,000 qualified workers would raise production potential by about 1.1 percentage points in the current year, said the paper released by the Cologne Institute for Economic Research (IW).
By 2027, the added value could total as much as €74 billion, its two authors calculated, using extrapolations to determine the skilled labour gap.
Unlike the actual production result, the production potential is an estimate of the production that would be possible at full capacity.
The IW economists noted the conservative nature of their calculation, which assumes that every suitably qualified unemployed person in Germany finds a job.
This is not the case in reality, and "the actual costs of the shortage of skilled labour are likely to be significantly higher," said the authors, who are similarly cautious in their calculations elsewhere.
In any case, the gap has grown significantly since 2010.
According to the IW experts, the key lever for reducing the shortage of skilled labour is more qualified immigration. Here, Germany's recently revised Skilled Labour Immigration Act has created new opportunities, they wrote.
Additional childcare facilities would help to get more women into work, as would changes to the taxation of married couples. Making it easier to employ older people would also have a positive effect, the paper says.
