EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Labour mobility as an adjustment mechanism

Alfonso Arpaia (), Áron Kiss, Balazs Palvolgyi and Alessandro Turrini

Quarterly Report on the Euro Area (QREA), 2015, vol. 14, issue 1, 19-25

Abstract: The movement of workers from one EU country to another has become an increasingly important adjustment mechanism for the European economy, particularly since the introduction of the euro. This section assesses the economic adjustment role played by labour mobility (i.e. intra-EU labour migration). It first looks at stylised facts on mobility in the EU before going on to analyse the reasons why workers move between countries. The analysis shows that labour mobility increases significantly when a country joins the EU. While euro area membership seems not to be associated with an overall rise in the magnitude of mobility flows, workers do appear more ready to move from countries where unemployment is high, to those where it is lower. The final part of the section shows that workers have become more likely to move to another EU country in response to economic shocks affecting only some countries. Movements in response to shocks have increased significantly since the introduction of the euro. The analysis demonstrates that real wages also became more responsive to asymmetric shocks during the same period.

Keywords: labour markets; macroeconomic adjustment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/publications/q ... ea1_section_2_en.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:euf:qreuro:0141-02

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Quarterly Report on the Euro Area (QREA) from Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ECFIN INFO ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:euf:qreuro:0141-02