CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Kurekova, Lucia |
|---|---|
| Title | From Job Search to Skill Search: Political Economy of Labor Migration in Central and Eastern Europe |
| Summary | This dissertation analyzes labor migration patterns in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) during the transition and after the accession of these countries to the EU. It addresses the question of why there has been a substantial variation in the degree of labor migration between CEE countries with very similar wage levels and living standards and the West – with high rates of migration from the Baltic countries, Poland, and Slovakia and lower rates among the workers from the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia. The dissertation makes a strong case that economic factors alone, as proposed in the neoclassical framework, fail to explain the diverse migration patterns across the CEE countries. Through analyzing CEE migration patterns in the context of the complex economic and social changes that the countries experienced during the transition from socialism to market economies, this dissertation builds a conceptually more accurate and empirically valid model. The research framework tests two factors that were excluded from the studies that estimated the expected migration flows from CEE prior to the enlargement: the impact of structural change and the role of welfare systems and state policies. These variables are analyzed in a framework that compares across countries and over time, but are also tied closely to two migrant profiles which capture two types of CEE migration over time. The empirical analyses show, first, that the pressures of economic change were distributed unevenly across countries and across populations within them and therefore induced some types of workers to seek migration as an exit option more than others, producing different occupational profiles of migrants across countries and generating different rates of migration. Second, the countries with less generous welfare states faced higher shares of their workers leaving to work abroad. In sum, I find that the CEE countries in which the opportunity structures have been more extensive, generated either by economic structures that are more favorable to the skill set and the preferences of its human capital and/or generous welfare policies, experienced lower out-migration rates. This interdisciplinary work contributes to the theories of migration and speaks directly to the most recent studies that have called to analyze migration as part of broader global processes and social change. The thesis carries out systematic comparative cross-national over time research about migrant sending countries and makes important steps in developing new ways of analyzing home countries’ role in affecting migration. |
| Supervisor | Duman, Anil |
| Department | International Relations PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/kurekova_lucia.pdf |
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