Migration in Baltic Sea area
Abstrakti
In the early 1990s the predictions in the literature on migration were that the quicker and more successful the economic development in Eastern Europe becomes, the more transitory the migration push would be.
The goal of this paper is to view migration from the macro-economic viewpoint and to answer how migration from Eastern European countries to Western (or more generally, from poorer to richer countries/regions) is affecting the labour market and the overall economic development of the sending country (named also as emigration country, or country of origin).
The central questions of the macro-economic approach to migration are: does development enhance migration and/or does international migration trigger economic development; migration as a problem of allocation of resources for economic development; should the emigration countries fear and limit the process of emigration.
To answer these questions, the case of Estonia is analysed. Estonia is a small country, which has been experiencing both very fast development and considerably increased emigration in the last decade (contrary to quite big-scale immigration decades before). During the Soviet period, the Baltic States were immigration countries with a strongly positive migration balance. These two processes in Estonia give us opportunity to study the causal relation between development and migration on this example.
In the public discourse of Estonia, fears of brain drain have been expressed. It is feared that higher wages and better living conditions in Western Europe tempt younger and better educated people to leave. This paper tries to answer the questions if the migration scale and pattern of Estonia is benefi cial — or on the contrary disadvantageous for the economic development of the country as a whole, and if there is a reason to talk about a brain-drain effect in Estonia. In the public discourse there have been expressed fears that higher wages and better living conditions in Western Europe attract younger and better educated people to leave.
