# **I Introduction**

The question of economic migration within the European Union continues to generate much debate within and outside academia. This debate is not helped by inaccurate information on the number of economic migrants, asylum seekers, and illegal migrants from outside the EU (Zaiceva and Zimmermann, 2008) as well as confusion as to who is a migrant and who is not (e.g., foreign born or foreign citizen). Because of these problems, international agencies tend to use estimates when discussing migration flows between countries and regions. Although the accuracy of the number of migrant workers is sometimes questionable, there is a well-established literature on what causes people to migrate within or between countries,<sup>3</sup> including wage differentials, risk preferences, job prospects, migrant networks and objectives of migrants. A well-established literature has emerged as to the costs and benefits of migration in relation to the host country.<sup>4</sup> A large body of work has also emerged analyzing whether migration is bad for the country of origin (e.g., brain-drain of the highly educated) or whether previously unrecognized feedback effects benefit the country (brain-gain<sup>5</sup> ). Another strand of the migration discussion focuses on whether migrants are permanent or temporary, with the latter leading to theoretical and empirical work on the causes of return migration.

This paper focuses on the planned migration return of current Romanian emigrants and what correlates with this plan to return. This is a relevant question given the Romanian population is estimated to have fallen from 21.8 million to 19 million between 2002 and 2011 (Figure 1). Outward migration was responsible for over half of this decline. Restrictions on Romanians’ right to work in most European Union (EU) countries did not prevent an increase in the stock of Romanian migrants abroad, from 1.3 million in 2000 to 2.8 million in 2010 (World Bank migration tables), or from 4.8 to 14.3 percent of the resident population in Romania (Figure 2). Migration may have acted as an important ‘safety valve’ in the functioning of labor markets in Romania during the 2000s. Many of those who would otherwise have registered as unemployed chose to leave Romania instead. On average, during the 2000s, 15.4 percent of migrants were unemployed when they left Romania compared with a national average unemployment rate of

> 3 Seminal work stems from Hicks (1932) who argued wage differences between countries was the main motivator for migrating, while Sjaastad (1962) and Becker (1964) argued that human capital theory triggered migration.  There are several excellent reviews of migration theory including Greenwood (1997), Borjas (1999), Chiswick (1999), Bauer and Zimmermann (1999) and Massey et al, (1993).

> 4 For a review of the theoretical and empirical evidence see Dustmann and Glitz (2005).

> 5 See Elmenstein and Stark (1998), Beine et al (2001, 2008), Stark (2003), Schiff (2005) who argue that greater returns to human capital abroad encourages greater migration but also greater accumulation of human capital in the home country improving the average productivity/quality of the domestic labour force.

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