Press releases

Emigration from Poland can have a strong impact on elections, according to a new study in the journal EconPol Forum. Higher emigration causes a significant increase in right-wing votes: a 1 percent increase in the number of emigrants increases the share of right-wing votes by 0.25 percent. The opposite is true for the left-wing parties: a 1 percent increase in the number of emigrants causes a 0.57 percent decline in left-wing parties’ share of the vote.

In a European comparison, the tax and contribution burden for middle-class incomes is highest in Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Finland, Lithuania, Slovenia, and the Netherlands. By contrast, France, Poland, Italy, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Austria impose average tax burdens on their middle classes, while the tax burden for the middle class is lowest in Spain, Greece, Estonia, Portugal, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Romania. These are the findings of a study conducted by the ifo Institute and EconPol Europe on behalf of the Hanns Seidel Foundation.

Employees in the German automotive industry are better qualified in e-mobility than employees in other Western countries. This is a finding by EconPol Europe researchers using data from the career network LinkedIn. In the German automotive industry, 6.2 percent of the employees on the online platform have skills in e-mobility. In the Italian automotive industry, the figure is 4.6 percent; in the US, 3.7 percent; in France, 3.3 percent; and in Spain, 2.4 percent. All values are based on employees’ self-reported data from 2023.

The President of the ifo Institute, Clemens Fuest, sees a need for improvement in the European Commission’s plans for debt rules in the EU. “Reform should focus on fiscal discipline and member states’ national ownership. In the Commission’s current proposal, this is only partly the case,” Fuest says. Allowing more debt when states give greater weight to EU policy priorities in their budgets might conflict with the goal of sustainable fiscal policy, he explained in an essay in the new EconPol Forum.

In the United States, the average time spent working from home is 1.4 days per week. In the United Kingdom, employees work from home for 1.5 days per week on average. In Australia, the average is 1.3 days. The leader among the English-speaking countries is Canada, at 1.7 days per week. In other Western countries, people spend much less time working from home. The average in Germany is 1.0 days, while in France and Italy, it is just 0.6 and 0.7 days per week. This is the finding of a survey of full-time employees conducted by the ifo Institute in a total of 34 countries.