The contribution of immigration from Ukraine to economic growth in Poland

Since 2014 Poland witnessed an unprecedented inflow of immigrant workers from Ukraine. Coupled with strong labour demand, this surge in labour supply provided a major contribution to Poland’s economic growth. However, due to problems with capturing immigration in Labour Force Survey (LFS) data this contribution has remained hitherto largely unaccounted in official data. In this paper we use a range of alternative official data sources to estimate the actual number of immigrants, and survey data on migrant characteristics, collected in four Polish cities, to estimate the effective labour supply of Ukrainian immigrants in terms of productivityadjusted hours worked. We find that the arrival of Ukrainian workers was increasing the effective labour supply in Poland in 2013-18 by 0.8% per annum. Imputing this additional labour supply in a growth accounting exercise we find that the (previously unaccounted) contribution of Ukrainian workers amounted to about 0.5 pp. per annum, i.e., about 13% of Poland’s GDP growth in 2013-18. The same figure should be subtracted from the residual contribution of total factor productivity (TFP) growth, suggesting that recent growth in Poland has been in fact much more labour-intensive than previously interpreted.