Baselland Business 2/2023 English
Business guide for the Basel-Landschaft region in German and English
Business guide for the Basel-Landschaft region in German and English
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
Interview Jan-Egbert Sturm<br />
The labour market<br />
reacts with a delay<br />
Jan-Egbert Sturm is the Director<br />
of the KOF Swiss Economic<br />
Institute at ETH Zurich. He is<br />
the guest speaker at the<br />
<strong>Business</strong> Day. He will speak on<br />
the topics of skilled workers<br />
and the labour market.<br />
Adrian Jäggi<br />
We are living through turbulent<br />
times on many fronts. Keywords<br />
are the Ukraine war, energy<br />
shock, inflation fear, digitalization<br />
or automation. How does it fit<br />
in that we have one of the lowest<br />
unemployment rates in history?<br />
Demographic factors in particular<br />
play an important role here. More<br />
and more people are taking well-deserved<br />
retirement, and fewer and<br />
fewer are taking their place. This<br />
phenomenon built up during the<br />
pandemic and has become increasingly<br />
apparent in the recovery and<br />
normalization phase since then. In<br />
addition, and this must also be seen<br />
in connection with the pandemic, we<br />
have had two very good economic<br />
years. Industry boomed and consumers<br />
were also able to spend more<br />
money again in the service sector.<br />
Only this year has the part of the<br />
economy that depends on foreign<br />
demand weakened. The labor market<br />
is reacting with a delay.<br />
The shortage of skilled workers in<br />
technical professions, industry<br />
and construction is particularly<br />
high. What is the best way to<br />
counteract this?<br />
That is a business management<br />
question. As an economist, I can<br />
only take a meta-perspective here,<br />
which usually means that more<br />
energy and effort must be expended<br />
to find and retain workers. The<br />
alternatives are more digitization<br />
and automation, and unfortunately<br />
one cannot rule out that this will<br />
also lead to some companies investing<br />
in other locations.<br />
You know the Swiss labor market<br />
inside out. In northwestern<br />
Switzerland, the conditions are<br />
not the same as in the rest of<br />
Switzerland. In this context, how<br />
well or how poorly does the Basel<br />
region stand?<br />
For decades, the Basel economic<br />
region has been strongly characterized<br />
by the positive structural<br />
development of the pharmaceutical<br />
industry. This also has a positive<br />
effect on the labor market.<br />
About the person<br />
Jan-Egbert Sturm has been a full professor of applied economic research<br />
at the Department of Management, Technology and Economics (D-MTEC) at ETH<br />
Zurich since October 2005 and is also director of the KOF Konjunkturforschungsstelle<br />
(<strong>Business</strong> Cycle Research Center) at ETH Zurich. Sturm is editor<br />
of the European Journal of Political Economy and a member of various<br />
committees and boards in Switzerland and abroad. He studied and received his<br />
doctorate at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. From 2001 to 2003, he was head of<br />
the Department of <strong>Business</strong> Cycles and Financial Markets at the Ifo Institute<br />
for Economic Research in Munich and held a professorship in economics, with<br />
a focus on macroeconomics and monetary policy, at the Center for Economic<br />
Studies (CES) of the Faculty of Economics at Ludwig Maximilian<br />
University in Munich. In 2003, he was appointed Full Professor<br />
of Economics, Chair of Monetary Economics of Open Economies at<br />
the University of Konstanz (D) and thus simultaneously took<br />
over the management of TWI - Thurgau Economic Institute at<br />
the University of Konstanz in Kreuzlingen (CH).
Change language