For a long time now, ETF has been advocating the skills dimension of migration in political agendas, and the importance of knowing and using the education levels, skills and professions of migrants. Being an EU agency for human capital development in the neighbourhood, we look at migration from ‘human capital perspective’, which requires thinking and combining migration, local labour markets and skills all together for a deeper reflection at the European level.
The most recent initiative of this line of thinking, ETF has just launched a new study “Migration dynamics from human capital perspective in six Western Balkan countries”, including Albania, Bosnia Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo. The study will look at the relationship/ interaction between the actual migratory flows on the one hand, and human capital formation and usage in their economies on the other. It aims to identify the impact of emigration on the human capital stocks and flows of the countries, and then to compare the skills profile of emigrant stocks with the skills needs and absorption capacity of the national labour markets. Naturally, this will also involve the testing of concepts such as brain drain, brain gain, brain waste and brain circulation in the context of those countries.
Better understanding the impact of migration on the skills pool and utilisation in the Western Balkans will also provide clues for the future economic development of the countries (under different scenarios). The results will shed light to under which conditions migration becomes ‘beneficial’ or ‘detrimental’ to the formation and usage of human capital in the domestic labour markets. ETF is working together with the Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies (WIIW) in this project as of the 1st December 2019, which will last until December 2020. WIIW’s international and national team of experts, together with the ETF’s migration team, will develop an analytical framework which connects migration, human capital and labour utilisation together and apply it into six Western Balkan countries. The findings will be shared in the form of short country fiches as well as a cross-country report which consolidates and compares all the results.
