Talent on the move : Welcome to EU Migration section

If you are a young Central European, there is a high chance that you have worked abroad, perhaps even higher than the chance that you have worked in your home country. If you are a young Pole, Slovak, Latvian and Lithuanian, the chances that I am right in my guess are much higher than if you are Czech, Slovenian, Hungarian or Estonian. Contrary to traditional concept of migrant, a young Central European migrant tends to stay and work abroad short-term and temporarily. And in spite of relatively good education – most of the time higher secondary or tertiary – tends to get employed in low skilled, low-qualified, or “3D” (dirty, dangerous and dull) jobs.

Why do (some) people move to work abroad - that is - what are the causes of migration – is a question which has occupied academics and policy-makers already for few decades, most of the scholarship being developed on the case of the US. Then, once we (somewhat) understand the causes, a further pressing question to ask is one of the effects of migration, both on host and home countries and communities. Clearly, understanding the causes can better inform us about the effects and it can also help us to understand why – still – majority of people in the world and in the EU does not move. These will be the issues discussed at this blog, looked at from various angles in order to understand what exactly is going on in the EU27 mobility-wise, how to estimate the magnitude, under what conditions to worry or to rejoice of the dynamics we see, which benefits and which problems have we already reaped and what have the firms, individuals and governments been doing and plan to do about it. The lens of my enquiries will come from and will be set on the region of Central and Eastern Europe, which in spite of the ‘demise of transition’ keeps posing puzzles and challenges for the theories developed elsewhere.

So, if you are interested to learn more about the role that Central and Eastern Europe has been playing in the global war on talent (note this down: a catch phrase of this and the coming eras!), why do Slovaks migrate and Czechs much less so, how to understand the role of industrial, education or social policy played out in the context of (not-only) post-EU enlargement migration flows, and about many other issues, please keep coming back. I will offer a cross-country and cross-discipline approach, in a language accessible to everyone (yes, even to economists :)

Lucia Kurekova