The Intra-EU Migration Challenge in the Light of Kaldor’s Legacy

The free movement of persons has been one of the fundamental building blocks of European integration from the beginning. The economics behind it implies that greater efficiency can be achieved if besides goods and services, the factors of production (i.e. capital and labour) can also move freely across a common market. Nevertheless, this setup was originally designed for an economic area where internal imbalances were modest. In fact, these freedoms have serious, originally unintended consequences in the 21st-century European Union (EU) where the original condition, even if implicit at that time, no longer applies. Nicholas Kaldor had actually warned about these threats many decades ago, saying that with the development of trade, initial differences among trading regions would grow in the absence of adequate compensating policies. Most lately, two large-scale events have accelerated intra-EU divergence and, consequently, migration: the Eastern enlargements and the recent financial and economic crisis. Our study focuses on the causes and potential implications of the intra-EU migration challenge in the light of Kaldor’s legacy. Our main conclusion is that the original construct of European economic integration is not fit for the current realities in that it no longer ensures steady and balanced development across the EU.