Skilled Migration

Skilled Migration: A Sign of Europe’s Divide or Integration? examines the trends, determinants, and impacts of migration of high-skilled workers within the European Union in the past two decades. High-skilled migration, whether internal or international, is largely a symptom rather than a cause of the gaps in labor market and educational opportunities, productivity, welfare, and the quality of institutions across the regions. Free movement within the European Union is an incentive for workers and firms to take advantage of these gaps by moving from low- to high-productivity sectors and regions. This process, however, results in winners and losers depending on the extent of the complementarity and substitutability between migrants and natives and on the capacity of the sending regions to realize benefits from return or circular migration and other knowledge spillovers. This study assesses the economic benefits and the costs of skilled migration in the short and long runs, emphasizing the potential implications of a large outflow of highly qualified workers on the economies of the originating regions. This book uses empirical analysis to present recommendations for labor market and education policies and identify effective ways to address the various costs that migration induces among different skill groups within regions that send migrants and those that receive migrants. These methods must also improve cross-country coordination to more effectively unlock the overall benefits of migration.