The Impact of Immigration on the Regional Growth in Spain

The aim of this paper is to compute, using an accounting exercise, the effect of immigrants over the three factors, which determine the income per capita (demographic factor, employment rate and productivity). We saw that immigration has had a positive effect over the two first, but negative over the productivity. Quantitative, for Spain, the immigration has had a neutral net effect over the per capita growth (0.05 points on annual average). However, at regional level we found important differences. Further, the total effect of immigration over the GDP growth rate is very positive. At national level we can say that more than 38% of the average annual growth rate can be assigned to immigrants. In this case the impact over the regional GDP has been very positive in all regions.