Managing migration promises to be one of the most difficult challenges of the twenty-first century. It will be even more difficult for south European countries, from which emigration has levelled off ...and to which immigration has become a significant economic issue. Southern Europe is close to other regions where the pressure to emigrate is intense: these regions have a high level of unemployment, above the European Union average, and a large informal sector, often 15–25 per cent of their economies as a whole. This book analyses the southern European migration case using an economic approach. It combines a theoretical and an empirical approach on the fundamental migration issues - the decision to migrate, effects on the country of departure and country of destination, and the effectiveness of policies in managing migration. It also explores the transformation due to migration of southern European countries in the 1980s and 1990s.
The countries of the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (SEM) and those in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are crucial to the development of the world economy. Highly skilled migration to and from these ...regions is key to the recent socio-political transformations that have occurred across the world. Despite this, in the states concerned, skilled migration remains an underlying 'issue of concern', rather than at the top of political agendas, leading to a spectrum of unclear and uncoordinated legal and policy frameworks. Containing a series of thematic and country-specific overviews, this book highlights the specificity of each region, and identifies and analyses key demographic, economic, legal and political data - allowing for policy prescription. Skilled Migration, the 'brain drain', and its impact is an extensively debated phenomenon and this will be an essential companion for social scientists, policy-makers and development scholars.
•Topic: skilled migration and innovation at industry level in UK, France and Germany.•Skilled natives and migrants increase innovation with elasticities of 0.3 and 0.09.•The contribution of skilled ...migration is higher in industries with low over-education.•The effect is stronger in industries with high FDIs and trade openness.•The effect is stronger in industries with more ethnical diversity at industry level.
This paper studies the effects of skilled migration on innovation –proxied by patent citations- in European industries between 1994 and 2005, using the French and the UK Labour Force Surveys and the German Microcensus. Highly-educated migrants have a positive effect on innovation, but the effect differs across industries. It is stronger in industries with low levels of overeducation, high levels of FDIs and openness to trade and, finally, in industries with higher ethnic diversity. The aggregate effect of the skilled immigrant is about one third the one of the skilled natives. We tackle the endogeneity of migrants with a set of external and internal instruments.
In this paper, we analyse the characteristics of employed migrants before and after the beginning of the recession in Italy to understand whether the economic crisis has exacerbated or reduced the ...high segmentation of the Italian labour market, with foreign workers largely concentrated in low-paid and low-quality jobs, even when highly educated. The analysis looks separately at male and female migrants because of strong gender specialisation, with the female component highly concentrated in the homecare and healthcare sectors, and the male component mainly employed in the manufacturing and construction sectors. We inquire how employment, working conditions, and wages have changed before and after the crisis in the sectors and occupations, where foreign workers are concentrated with respect to the other sectors and occupations of the Italian economy. We conclude that the disadvantage of being in a segmented labour market nevertheless allowed for positive growth of foreign employment during the recession, but it implied an even greater segregation in terms of low-skilled, unstable, and poorly paid jobs.
International migration should be a core subject for global governance, given its transnational nature, and yet it is its ＂ugly duckling＂ and the global community has shied away from taking any ...concrete action to regulate cross-border flows of people, at least until 2015, when the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean prompted Turkey to include migration in the Antalya agenda. It is unlikely that the international community will move beyond the current consensus based on humanitarian principles and recognize that the free flow of people is a right, on the same level as trade and capital liberalization. At the same time, much of the criticism of migration policies is misplaced.＂ efforts shouM be focused on improving the implementation of existing policies and fine-tune these policies in relation to entrance and integration, preferably in cooperation with the country of origin. The G20 should play a leading role in facilitating such coordination, also taking into account the increasing importance of South-South migration （such as the migration of Chinese citizens to Africa）.
This article contributes to the understanding of the westward migration of Eastern European women, by comparing Moldovan and Ukrainian women in Italy – the most popular destination for both groups – ...where they are mainly employed as domestic workers and home carers. Focusing on the differences in their trajectories in this labour sector, we discuss the significance of their age at emigration and their role within their families of origin. These have an impact not only on their mobility patterns, but also on their choices of employment and general socio‐cultural integration in the host country.
As with economic integration, immigrants’ social integration improves along with their years of residence in destination countries. Policies have some potential to influence the process of social ...integration.
Cultural differences play an important role in shaping migration patterns. The conventional proxies for cross country cultural differences, such as common language; ethnicity; genetic traits; or ...religion, implicitly assume that cultural proximity between two countries is constant over time and symmetric. This is far from realistic. This paper proposes a gravity model for international migration which explicitly allows for the time varying and asymmetric dimensions of cultural proximity. In accordance with Disdier, Tai, Fontagné, Mayer (Rev World Econ, 145(4):575–595, 2010) we assume that the evolution of bilateral cultural affinity over time is reflected in the intensity of bilateral trade in cultural goods. The empirical framework includes a comprehensive set of high dimensional fixed effects which enable identification of the impact of cultural proximity on migration over and beyond the effect of pre-existing cultural and historical ties. The results are robust across different econometric techniques and suggest that positive changes in cultural relationships over time foster bilateral migration.
We analyze the role of migrants in productivity growth in the three largest European countries—France, Germany and the United Kingdom—in the years 1994–2007, using Total Factor Productivity. Unlike ...previous research, which mainly employs a regional approach, our analysis is at the sectoral level: this allows to distinguish the real contribution of migrants to productivity from possible inter‐sectoral complementarities, which might also foster growth. We control for the share of migrants and the different components of human‐capital, such as education, age and diversity, and adopt instrumental variables strategies to address the possible endogeneity of migration. The results show that migrants contribute to the productivity of the sectors in which they are employed, but with important differences: highly‐educated migrants show a larger positive effect in high‐tech sectors, and to a lesser extent in services sector. The diversity of countries of origin contributes to productivity growth only in the services sectors.
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