Youth mobility and the development of human capital: is there a Southern European model?

ABSTRACT

Recent Southern European migration is characterised by important flows of higher-skilled young persons. The balance between the risk of a new brain drain and brain waste and the opportunity of brain gain depends on how the young migrants integrate into the labour market of destination, the new abilities they acquire and the possibilities of re-integrating into the labour market of origin, in case of return migration. In this paper we discuss the contribution of international youth mobility to the development of human capital. We focus on the individual gain in origin countries/regions generated by circulation and return and concentrate on total human capital. Our results – based on 120 in-depth interviews conducted in Italy and Spain, in both core (Rome and Madrid) and peripheral (Apennines and Andalusia) areas, with young students and lower- and higher-skilled workers – show that both Italians and Spaniards have acquired soft skills and these informal and tacit competences are considered to be as important as formal and explicit ones. For young Italians, brain circulation predominates and the human capital gained during migration results in better employability and earnings; for young Spaniards, circulation and return are more difficult in spite of their enriched human capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Human capital
• youth mobility and migration
• return migration
• brain circulation
• brain training

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the EU HORIZON 2020 Programme, Project YMOBILITY under Grant Agreement 649491. We thank Armando Montanari for his continuous support during the research phase.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This figure is an underestimation of the real number of people who moved since it is calculated using the numbers who cancelled their residence from the Population Registers.