Documents Raaum, Oddbjørn 4 results

"Based on individual longitudinal data, we examine the evolution of employment and earnings of post?EU accession Eastern European labour immigrants to Norway for a period of up to eight years after entry. We find that the migrants were particularly vulnerable to the negative labour demand shock generated by the financial crisis. During the winter months of 2008/09, the fraction of immigrant men claiming unemployment insurance benefits rose from below 2 to 14 per cent. Some of this increase turned out to be persistent, and unemployment remained considerably higher among immigrants than natives even three years after the crisis. Although we find that negative labour demand shocks raise the probability of return migration, the majority of the labour migrants directly affected by the downturn stayed in Norway and claimed unemployment insurance benefits."

"A new Report “Integrating immigrants into the Nordic labour markets. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic” by Nordregio and the Nordic Council of Minsters shows that the Covid-19 pandemic has made social and economic inequalities even more pronounced in the Nordic countries. In all countries, foreign-born people have experienced stronger increases in unemployment than their native-born peers. Immigrants born outside the EU, especially individuals with low levels of education, have faced the largest challenges in finding and keeping employment in 2020.

In the new report, researchers stress that the current crisis also underscores the need for uniform social insurance systems. Statistics from Norway show that immigrants from new EU member countries in Central and Eastern Europe have been vastly overrepresented among job losers. Hence, the inclusion of these workers in a relatively generous social insurance system has been critical to prevent poverty and minimize demand-driven ‘knock-on effects' from income decline in industries directly affected by the crisis.

This study builds on a comprehensive report about immigrant integration into the Nordic labour markets that was published by the Nordic Council of Ministers in 2019. It revisits some of the conclusions and policy recommendations outlined in 2019 – in relation to the impact of Covid-19 on unemployment among foreign-born. The report is part of the Nordic Cooperation Programme for Integration of Immigrants, initiated in 2016, in which the Nordic Welfare Centre and Nordregio cooperate. "

"We study the impact of work loss on mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Combining data on work loss and health care consultations from comprehensive individual-level register data, we define groups of employees delineated by industry, region, age, and gender. With these groups, we use a difference-in-differences framework to document significantly increased rates of consultations for psychological conditions among workers with higher exposure to work loss. The increases, and their persistence, were markedly higher for consultations in specialist (vs. primary) care, indicating that the deterioration of mental health was more than a widespread increase in lighter symptoms. Overall, our findings suggest that the economic disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic adversely affected the mental health of workers most exposed to loss of work."