[Article] European Migration: Welfare Migration or Economic Migration?

Research Article_s Economics

The paper addresses the question of the determinants of migration flows towards 14 Western European countries that are part of the so-called EU-15.

Pavel Svaton (The Brookings Institution) , Thierry Warin https://www.warin.ca (HEC Montréal and CIRANO (Canada))https://www.hec.ca/en/profs/thierry.warin.html
09-26-2008

Abstract

This paper presents an empirical assessment of bilateral migration flows into the EU-15 countries. Using an extended gravity model, it identifies economic, welfare state, geospatial and linguistic variables as the principal determinants of migration flows into the EU-15 countries. As long as its effect is not offset by a high unemployment rate in the host country, the level of social protection expenditure influences migrants’ choice of destination. However, albeit acting as a joint force with other economic, cultural and geospatial variables, the welfare state characteristics of the host country need to be reckoned with when studying European migration flows. Our empirical findings lend some support for a more unified or at least better coordinated social policy across the European Union.

Keywords: migration; welfare migration; economic migration; border effects


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Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Svaton & Warin, "Thierry Warin, PhD: [Article] European Migration: Welfare Migration or Economic Migration?", Global Economy Journal, 2008

BibTeX citation

@article{svaton2008[article],
  author = {Svaton, Pavel and Warin, Thierry},
  title = {Thierry Warin, PhD: [Article] European Migration: Welfare Migration or Economic Migration?},
  journal = {Global Economy Journal},
  year = {2008},
  note = {https://warin.ca/posts/article-european-migration/},
  doi = {10.2202/1524-5861.1360}
}