Originally posted by BlasterBates
View Post
http://engine.is/wp-content/uploads/FINALEUTECH.pdf
it is quite surprising that actual
mobility within the EU is fairly low. In the two-year period up to 2012, among the more than 500
million inhabitants of the European Union, only 650,000 persons moved to work in another Member
State (no data was available for Belgium). This figure points to considerably subdued worker
mobility when compared to the two-year period up to 2008, just before the onset of the crisis. Back
then, approximately 900,000 economically active persons moved cross-border in order to work.
Labour mobility needs to increase by almost 40% in order to return to pre-crisis levels. Looking
at the total stock of EU citizens working in another Member State, this indicator amounted to 6.6
million in 2012, which equaled a mere 3% of the labour force (EU Comm 2013). European labour
mobility is also quite low when compared to large countries with a federal structure in other parts
of the world. For instance, the OECD has calculated that, in 2010, inter-regional mobility within
the EU-15 Member States averaged to 1% of the total population, and cross-border mobility to
0.35%. In contrast, the figures for the United States, Australia and Canada were 2.4, 1.5 and 1.0%,
respectively (OECD 2012). Comparisons between the United States and the EU-27 regarding interregional
mobility for the year 2008 yield a figure of 2.8% for the former and 1.03% for the latter More importantly however, when examining skills/occupation matches, a strong evidence of over-qualification
and the corresponding underutilisation of EU-10 migrant workers’ skills emerge as a pervasive
phenomenon
On the other hand, 86% of EU-8 and 95% of
EU-2 migrants have blue-collar jobs. The jobs-to-skills mismatch and thus the underutilisation of human
capital of EU-10 migrant workers which has been highlighted by our results points to one of the biggest
challenges with regard to recent intra-EU labour mobility. This phenomenon also points to a failure of
migration-related policies that could help to improve the efficiency of cross-border labour mobility.
the available data indicate that the education level of mobile EU citizens tends to be high (especially from the eight Eastern European Member States (EU-8) which joined in 2004) but that the majority are employed in low-skilled occupations
The idea that Polish engineers or IT specialists are moving to the UK is hogwash.
Comment