Population Decline or Cost Efficiency? Migrant Employment as a Response to Rural Demographic Change

Agnieszka Fihel , University of Warsaw

Population ageing, rural outmigration, and the consequent shrinking of local labour have profoundly reshaped the employment in agricultural across Europe. As younger cohorts leave rural areas and native labour supply declines, agriculture and other food-related sectors (food processing, catering) has become increasingly reliant on migrant workers. This paper investigates the demographic and structural mechanisms underlying farmers’ employment decisions, focusing on 1) economic attributes of migrant work (lower reservation wages, greater temporal flexibility, and higher tolerance of informal employment) and 2) insufficient supply of local native workers. Drawing on an original survey of 1,200 employers in food-related industries in Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Spain, complemented by expert focus groups in each country, the analysis examines how demographic decline and labour shortages interact with changing agrarian labour regimes. Findings indicate that farmers’ preference for migrants cannot be explained solely by cost minimisation but reflects a broader transformation of rural labour markets, where agricultural work has become socially and economically unattractive to national workers. The study concludes that the employment of migrants represents a long-term demographic adjustment to rural depopulation and ageing, embedding European agriculture in a structural dependence on cross-border labour mobility.

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 Presented in Session P7. Education, Labor Market, and Economic Issues