SPEECH DATE:  07/05/2019  SPEAKER:  Governor Stefan Ingves  VENUE:  Swedish Economics Association  SVERIGES RIKSBANK SE-103 37 Stockholm (Brunkebergstorg 11) Tel +46 8 787 00 00 Fax +46 8 21 05 31 registratorn@riksbank.se www.riksbank.se  Long-term trends – important elements in the monetary policy analysis1 I shall begin by thanking you for the invitation. Coming here to the Swedish Economics Association to discuss various issues concerning the Riksbank's activities is something I really appreciate and enjoy. Today's speech is actually the fourteenth I have given, so it is beginning to be rather a habit to come back here every year. I intend to devote a large part of today's speech to the Swedish labour market and some of the overall trends and challenges it is facing, that is, what are usually known as “structural changes”. In this context it may be worth reminding ourselves of the predictions of two famous economists. Almost 90 years ago, John Maynard Keynes predicted that the rapid automation of work tasks would lead to “technological unemployment”. 2 Another famous economist, Wassily Leontief, foresaw similar problems 20 years later: “Labour will become less and less important ... More and more workers will be replaced by machines. I do not see that new industries can employ everybody who wants a job”. 3 As we know, these predictions have not come true, but nevertheless a similar debate has arisen recently.
18 Since then, migration has increased steadily and at the end of 2017 the percentage of those born abroad was more than 18 per cent. The migration streams can vary substantially from year to year, but the trend has been rising and there has been a particularly substantial increase in recent decades, see Figure 9. Figure 9. Immigration and emigration as a proportion of population, 1900–2018 1.8  1.8 Immigration 1.5  Emigration  1.5  1.2  1.2  0.9  0.9  0.6  0.6  0.3  0.3  0 1900  1915  1930  1945  1960  1975  1990  2005  0  Note. Per cent of the population. To be counted as an emigrant, a person must have the intention of living abroad for at least one year. To be counted as an immigrant, a person must have the intention of staying in Sweden for at least one year. Source: Statistics Sweden  Immigration to Sweden follows an international trend with increasingly large migration streams. Between 2000 and 2017 the total number of migrants in the world increased by around 50 per cent. There are roughly around 260 million migrants at the moment, most of whom are from low-income countries. These migrants move at approximately the same extent to low income countries as to high income countries, see Figure 10a. Migration from high income countries is much less common, but there is a not insignificant amount of migration between high income countries.