The impact of demographic deterioration on labour balances in Greece

This paper investigates the impact of demographic deterioration on Greek labour supply, and the possible labour shortages that it may entail. Through a disaggregated approach by occupation and region, the paper predicts, for the year 2000, the new entry to and exit from the labour force, as well as labour requirements. Various methods are used, such as temporal shifts of youth and workers by age brackets for predicting net demographic additions to the labour force, shift and share analysis for decomposing employment changes, and the manpower requirements approach for predicting employment through output and productivity projections. The occupational and regional predictions are mostly done by top‐down calculations. Finally, a formula is invented for measuring the occupational and regional intensity of demographic deficits. Despite the predicted demographic deficits in almost all regions of the country, immigrants and other additional workers to the job market will fill the demographic gap, but many of them will also remain unemployed.