More than Additions to Population: The Economic and Fiscal Impact of Immigration

In the conceptual framework of the Intergenerational Reports, immigration features as an exogenous input into the size of the population and its composition by age and sex. There are good reasons for believing that immigration has sizeable endogenous components, that attributes other than age and sex distinguish immigrants from the native‐born, as well as from each other, and that these features are of significant economic and fiscal import. Last, it is suggested that, in the context of an ageing population, we may learn much about the effectiveness of different policy responses in achieving fiscal sustainability—as well as immigration policy—through a dynamic life cycle accounting approach.