KNOWLEDGE-BASED MIGRATION AND MOBILITY: THE ECONOMIC 'GAMBLE' OF THE EASTERN NEIGHBOURHOOD

Abstract

To what extent can the scientific migration and mobility, and remittances impact the economic development of the donor and recipient states? How significant are they as a resource for the enhancement of the Eastern Partnership? The policy brief provides the results of the quantitative assessment of the costs and benefits of "smart" labour migration in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries and proposes some policy recommendations to enhance the benefits stemming from knowledge-based migration and mobility flows. We received the proof of mutual causality between human development indicator of donor-state and most significant performance indicators of EaP migration in the EU ("smart mobility"). This means that HDI of a donor-state is flexible to the internal situation in the country, and so the positive effect of smart mobility and remittance inflows can be easily absorbed inside the EaP. The same we observed for gross national income of EaP donor-states. However, our approach does not provide the answer: what is exactly the effect or the result. The convergence effect of scientific migration in the EU and the Eastern Partnership region is considered on the ground of the calculative assessment. We considered "fi-convergence" approach, stating that it occurs when the EaP mobility rate grows faster than the EU ones. As for o-convergence, we defined it as a reduction of future rates of variation (inequality, differentiation) in the levels of migration of regions (countries). We can conclude that there is the convergence between the EU & EaP in the scientific migration in the years of the EaP initiation, but no results in the process of its fulfilment.

Keywords

• Eastern Partnership
• knowledge-base migration
• European Union
• correlation
• mobility
• assessment
• convergence