The Intra-EU Migration Challenge in the Light of Kaldor’s Legacy

Anita Pelle

Acta Oeconomica, 2017, vol. 67, issue supplement1, 175-196

Abstract: The free movement of persons has been one of the fundamental building blocks of European integration from the beginning. The economics behind it implies that greater efficiency can be achieved if besides goods and services, the factors of production (i.e. capital and labour) can also move freely across a common market. Nevertheless, this setup was originally designed for an economic area where internal imbalances were modest. In fact, these freedoms have serious, originally unintended consequences in the 21st-century European Union (EU) where the original condition, even if implicit at that time, no longer applies. Nicholas Kaldor had actually warned about these threats many decades ago, saying that with the development of trade, initial differences among trading regions would grow in the absence of adequate compensating policies. Most lately, two large-scale events have accelerated intra-EU divergence and, consequently, migration: the Eastern enlargements and the recent financial and economic crisis. Our study focuses on the causes and potential implications of the intra-EU migration challenge in the light of Kaldor’s legacy. Our main conclusion is that the original construct of European economic integration is not fit for the current realities in that it no longer ensures steady and balanced development across the EU.

Keywords: European integration; growth; convergence; Nicholas Kaldor (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O10 O47 O52 O57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
Note: The research on which the article is based has been carried out within the framework of the author’s project, “Need for a competitiveness union in the EU”, project ID: 553486-EPP-1-2014-1-HU-EPPJMO-CHAIR, co-financed by the European Union under Erasmus+. The author is grateful to the organisers of the conference as the event has helped her significantly in realising the true relevance of Kaldor’s insights in relation to the current challenges of European integration, and in finding the connections between these. Also, she is greatly indebted to the Library of the Corvinus University for providing access to important sources written by and about Kaldor, without which this article could not have been written in its current form.
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