Labor Migration, EU Enlargement, and the Great Recession

This volume extends and deepens our knowledge about cross-border mobility and its role in an enlarged EU. More specifically, its main purpose is to enlighten the growing and yet rather uninformed debate about the role of post-enlargement migration for economic adjustment in the crisis-stricken labor markets of the Eurozone and the EU as a whole. The book addresses the political economy aspects of post-enlargement migration, including its broader political contexts, redistributive impacts, but also nationalization of the enlargement agenda. It also covers the experience of receiving and sending countries with post-enlargement migration and its role during the current crisis. Renowned experts in the field study, whether and how post-enlargement mobility has enabled the EU to absorb asymmetric economic shocks, how it has affected the European welfare systems, and whether it has contributed to the sustainability of the Eurozone. The authors also evaluate brain circulation as a sought-after vehicle of improved allocative efficiency of EU labor markets and propose a policy agenda for mobility in an enlarged EU.

Martin Kahanec is Associate Professor and PhD track representative (Public Policy) at the Central European University in Budapest and founder and Scientific Director of the Central European Labour Studies Institute (CELSI) in Bratislava. At the same time Kahanec is Visiting Research Fellow, Deputy Program Director 'Migration', the leader of the research sub-area EU Enlargement and the Labor Markets and former Deputy Director of Research (2009) at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany. He has held several advisory positions and leading roles in a number of scientific and policy projects with the World Bank, the European Commission, and other international and national institutions. Among his publications are various contributions to the economics of migration.

Klaus F. Zimmermann is Director of the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, Germany as well as Full Professor of Economics at the University of Bonn and Honorary Professor at the Free University of Berlin and the Renmin University of China. Among others he serves as fellow of various scientific institutions and member of the Academia Europaea, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Migration. Zimmermann regularly advises the World Bank, the European Commission, the European Parliament and governments on the national and international level. Migration and labor mobility are at the core of his intensive research and policy advice activities. His numerous publications in the field cover all aspects of worldwide migration flows, ethnic diversity, and labor market integration.