Central and Eastern European Labor Mobility to the EU15 Countries Before and After European Union Accession

Abstract

Despite the fact that European Union member-state politicians are committed by Treaty of Rome obligations to make intra-EU freedom of production factor movement a central goal of their economic development plans, many of those same politicians have reacted negatively in the past to the anticipated waves of poorer-country workers who they believe would shift residences once their economies have joined the EU. During the enlargement round of the 2000s, many EU15 governments insisted upon and took advantage of derogations in the new member-states' accession treaties that allowed the older members to delay the free movement of CEEC10 workers for up to seven years. This action was taken despite several reputable studies sponsored by the European Commission and various think tanks that indicated that the size of CEEC10 worker movement would be modest at most. The goal of this analysis is to test the plausibility of these forecasts and to determine whether the EU15 governments should have expended the political capital necessary to negotiate and implement this derogation. Using the generalized least squares statistical technique, this research establishes that while economic factors and certain policies do influence migration rates, network theory variables and the implementation of a free migration policy do not. This outcome implies that member states that wish to limit initial poor-country worker migration to their economies would be better-served by channeling their efforts into EU cohesion policy and others that encourage intra-EU economic growth. It also suggests that the free worker migration derogation should be omitted from future accession treaties except perhaps as a psychological balm for receiver-country workers. Additionally, several migration projections using the GLS estimators (with no country-specific estimators) and an under-utilized technique called systems modeling are forecast here under a variety of policy conditions. The results of these projections indicate that the modest consensus forecasts conducted in the run-up to CEEC10 accession were reasonable and perhaps even a bit high.