Migration and Labour Mobility in an Enlarged European Union

How many will come? Thousands, millions? Does Europe need a New Iron Cuitain? These questions dominate the origoing negotiations of the East Enlargements of the European Union (EU) Western Europeans are afraid of being overflowed by cheap(er) eastern European labourers. It is feared that the removal of barriers to migration would lead to a mass exodus from eastern to western Europe. In this article. I draw a parallel between the southerly enlargement of the EU and the EU east enlargement with respect to migration. Then, I undertake an econometric estimate of South-North migration flows and assume that the estimated parameter are of exemplary significance for the eastern enlargement of the EU. As a result of some simulation exercises my calculations advocate that rather modest immigrant flows from Eastern Europe have to be expected in the EU, in free mobility of labour was allowed today. This paper is part of the HWWA rescearch programme "International mobility of Firms and Workers"

Is Turkey still an emigration country?

Located at the geographical intersection between East and West, with both Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, Turkey was always a country with large movements of people. There were several waves of forced (ethnic) movement of people as a consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the following nation-building process in the Turkish neighborhood. In the post-Second world war period, Turkey became a country of emigration. In 1961 a bilateral agreement on labor recruitment between Turkey and Germany had been signed. In the following years, similar bilateral agreements were reached with a couple of other European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherland and Sweden). Nowadays, things have changed. Turkey is still a country of emigration. But it has also become a country of immigration and transit. And therefore, it faces similar challenges of migration and integration that are characteristic for areas with strong cross-cultural movements of people. In this paper, we concentrate on the emigration flows. --

The Turkish economy after the global economic crisis

The Turkish economy has gone thru a fast and strong change in recent years. Three dimensions are of special significance: 1. Firstly, the Turkish economy has grown very quickly, with three severe recessions in 1994, 2000/1 and 2009. 2. Secondly, it has opened up rapidly but is still not that open as other economies with a similar level of development. 3. Thirdly, private business has increased but state enterprises or publicly owned and run firms are still important. --

Numerical Optimization of Eigenvalues of the Dirichlet-Laplace Operator on Domains in Surfaces

Let (M,g) be a smooth and complete surface, Ω⊂M$\Omega \subset M$ be a domain in M, and Δ g $\Delta _g$ be the Laplace operator on M. The spectrum of the Dirichlet-Laplace operator on Ω is a sequence 0<λ 1 (Ω)≤λ 2 (Ω)≤⋯↗∞0 < \lambda _1(\Omega ) \le \lambda _2(\Omega ) \le \cdots \nearrow \infty . A classical question is to ask what is the domain Ω * $\Omega ^*$ which minimizes λ m (Ω)$\lambda _m(\Omega )$ among all domains of a given area, and what is the value of the corresponding λ m (Ω m * )$\lambda _m(\Omega _m^*)$ . The aim of this article is to present a numerical algorithm using shape optimization and based on the finite element method to find an approximation of a candidate for Ω m * $\Omega _m^*$ . Some verifications with existing numerical results are carried out for the first eigenvalues of domains in ℝ2. Furthermore, some investigations are presented in the two-dimensional sphere to illustrate the case of the positive curvature, in hyperbolic space for the negative curvature and in a hyperboloid for a non-constant curvatur

Turkey: Change from an emigration to an immigration and now to a transit migration country

In the post Second World War period Turkey was an emigration country for a long time. But things have changed since. After the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, immigration from the neighborhood to Turkey increased substantially. A lively cross-border movement with the countries of the former Soviet Union, but also with the Middle East countries (i.e. especially Iran), has occurred. On the other hand, Western European countries have become extremely reluctant to open up their borders to Turkish migrants. As a consequence, Turkey is a country of emigration, immigration and transit, nowadays. In this paper, we concentrate on immigration and transit migration. --

Divergence – Is it Geography?

This paper tests directly a geography and growth model using regional data for Europe, the US, and Japan during di®erent time periods. We set up a standard geography and growth model with a poverty trap and derive a log- linearized growth equation that corresponds directly to a threshold regression technique in econometrics. In particular, we test whether regions with high population density (centers) grow faster and have a permanently higher per capita income than regions with low population density (peripheries). We find geography driven divergence for US states and European regions after 1980. Population density is superior in explaining divergence to initial income which the most important o±cial EU eligibility criterium for regional aid is built on. Divergence is stronger on smaller regional units (NUTS3) than on larger ones (NUTS2). Thus, the wavelength of agglomeration forces seems to be rather small in Europe. Human capital and R&D are transmission channels of divergence processes. Human capital based poverty trap models are an alternative explanation for regional poverty traps.Keywords: threshold estimation, economic geography, regional income convergence, poverty trap, regime shifts, bootstrap