Bad Times, Good Times to Move? The Changing Landscape of Intra-EU Migration

More than half a century ago, a future winner of the Nobel prize in economics assessed the case for multinational monetary integration, concluding that ‘an essential ingredient of a common currency, or a single currency area, is a high degree of [production] factor mobility’ (Mundell 1961: 661). The EU free movement regime and the Eurocrisis provide the ideal conditions for a real-life test of Mundell’s theory: Have workers from the countries most affected by the Eurocrisis in the late 2000s relocated to the most thriving labour markets of the continent? Have open intra-EU borders worked as safety valves for displaced labour? This paper focuses on intra-EU movements in order to determine whether they have indeed changed in size and composition during the recent global crisis. We first draw an overall picture of migrant stocks and flows in Europe before and during the recession based on the Eurostat databases. We find that with the exception of Ireland, other Western economies hit by the crisis were not abandoned en masse as the popular press suggested. In the second step on the basis of cross-sectional Eurobarometer data we examine propensity to migrate to search for work within the EU in 2006, 2009 and 2011. We use multilevel modelling in order to examine the impact of individual resources, and also institutional and economic country effects on migration intentions