Drivers of highly skilled mobility from Southern Europe: escaping the crisis and emancipating oneself

ABSTRACT

Since the outbreak of the crisis in Southern Europe, young highly educated Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese and Greeks have been taking their talents and expertise to other countries in search of a better quality of life and career prospects. This paper explores the characteristics of these new emigrants, the reasons for which they are leaving, and whether these reasons are shaped by the economic crisis, by pre-crisis grievances, or by other factors. We analyse original data from 6377 questionnaires collected in 4 countries through an e-survey we ran in 2013. We refer to the existing literature on the drivers of highly skilled emigration and the (un)employment situation in the four aforementioned Southern European countries which have been hardest hit by the economic crisis. We suggest that while gender is not important, age, marital status, education and satisfaction with current employment (both income related and with regard to future prospects) are important factors predicting emigration. Non-economic factors, notably career opportunities, quality of life and future prospects supersede all other considerations in the decision to emigrate for these highly educated Europeans.

KEYWORDS:

• Highly skilled migration
• mobility
• economic crisis
• emigration
• brain drain
• Southern Europe
• Greece
• Italy
• Spain
• Portugal

View correction statement:

Erratum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The effects of the crisis on migrants have been studied in both the European and US contexts, see for instance McCollum et al. (2016) or Visser (2016).

2. The number of responses by origin country depends more on the success of the ‘advertising’ campaign put in place by each national institute to reach out emigrants through their institutional channels and public (on-line) media, than on the size of the phenomenon in each country. The publication of an article on the on-line edition of Público, a Portuguese daily newspaper, is behind the high number of Portuguese respondents.

3. The Chi-squared test measures the level of association or independence between pairs of categorical variables. For the way it is constructed, larger samples give larger χ² statistics.

4. The same has been claimed in the case of Ireland: Cairns 2014; Glynn, Kelly, and Mac Einrí (2015).

5. European Commission (2016), Employment and Social Developments in Europe 2015: http://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=738&langId=en&pubId=7859&furtherPubs=yes (accessed on 11 April 2016).

6. This is not to deny of course that protracted unemployment has scarring effects also on middle-aged workers and makes their return into employment difficult.