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Should I Stay or Should I Go? Romanian Migrants During Transition and Enlargements

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Labor Migration, EU Enlargement, and the Great Recession

Abstract

Before the collapse of its communist regime in December 1989, Romania had been one of the most closed Eastern European countries, resulting in several demographic, economic, social and political characteristics referred to as the initial conditions. These are used to explain some of the differences in performances and behavior when comparing Romania and/or Romanians to their ex-communist peer countries from Europe. Although Romania became the first country in Central and Eastern Europe to establish relations with the European Community in 1974, together with Bulgaria, it was not invited to join the European Union in 2004, when eight former socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe became EU member states (i.e., the EU8 countries). However, there is no systematic evidence that Romania or Bulgaria (i.e., the EU2 countries) have been backsliding or that their trajectories differ significantly from the EU8 countries (Levitz and Pop-Eleches Europe-Asia Studies 62(3): 461–479, 2010).

The authors are grateful to the editors of this volume Martin Kahanec and Klaus F. Zimmermann and, as well as the anonymous referee for providing a number of suggestions that helped to improve the chapter significantly. We thank the participants at the 5th IZA/CEUR Workshop on EU Enlargement and the Labor Markets: Migration, Crisis and Adjustment in an Enlarged E(M)U II for useful comments and suggestions. We remain responsible for any mistakes still present.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We refer, for instance, to the Generalized System of Preferences Agreement in 1974 and an Agreement on Industrial Products in 1980.

  2. 2.

    1.2 million workers migrated between 2004 and 2007 from Eastern Europe to the UK (770,000), Ireland (416,000) and Sweden (19,000), and emigration had a significant impact on the wage structure, particularly on the wage distribution between old and young workers (Elsner 2013).

  3. 3.

    Even though Freedom of Movement, a basic principle of the EU, guarantees every worker from the New Member States the right to migrate to any EU country and take up employment, in practice only Ireland, the UK and Sweden immediately opened their labor markets in 2004.

  4. 4.

    Data concerning permanent emigration is officially released in the statistical yearbooks, and “official data on the dynamics of temporary emigration are very limited” (Sandu 2007).

  5. 5.

    The Migration and Development Program was launched by the Soros Foundation in Bucharest in 2006, specifically in the context of the integration of Romania in the European Union, which aimed to find out the general characteristics of Romanian migration (2006) or to estimate the effect of temporary immigration (2007–2008).

  6. 6.

    Ambrosini et al. (2012) analyzed the rationality of decisions to migrate and return with regard to the observed selectivity patterns and the sorting of Romanian migrants across three destinations: the US, Spain and Austria. Based on a combination of four observable characteristics (education, age, gender, family type) they created 320 cells to estimate their wage-earning ability and their probability of employment (in Romania). For each cell, they count non-migrants, returnees and migrants to the US, Austria and Spain to determine how these groups compare to each other in their distribution across skills.

  7. 7.

    According to National Institute of Statistics (2009) data, between 1.4 and 1.7 million persons work in informal economy.

  8. 8.

    Sandu (2005) focuses on the particular case of migrants from Romanian villages to foreign countries and describes the circular migration outside Romania, as a particular type of temporary migration during the period 1990–2001.

  9. 9.

    Disposable income was below 60 % of the national average, after social security transfers.

  10. 10.

    The government not only encouraged workers to retire at the lower threshold of the mandatory retirement ages (60 years for men and 55 years for women), it also allowed early retirement for workers who had worked in a risky work environment and generously granted invalidity pensions (connected to the strong “culture” of buying medical certificates that prove permanent or temporary loss of capacity to work).

  11. 11.

    In 1990, the pensioner/employee dependency rate was 0.42, and 10 years later the dependency ratio was three times as high, meaning that each employee was supporting 1.32 pensioners.

  12. 12.

    According to Eurostat (2012) data, the employment rate for people aged more than 65 was 38 % in 2000 and decreased to 13 % in 2010, which was still much higher compared to the European average of 4.7 %.

  13. 13.

    For example, in the 1977 census, ethnic Germans only represented 1.6 % of the population, but they constituted 44 % of the emigrant population during 1975–1989.

  14. 14.

    The report is based on two datasets: (1) a household survey, based on 1427 household interviews conducted in August 2010, with 1130 households with one or more members experiencing long-term migration and 297 households without migration experience. (2) a migrant survey that took place in August and September 2010, covering a sample of 2901 Romanian citizens working and living abroad for at least 12 months. However, the available reports do not report any information about the samples’ representativeness. This is an important detail that should be taking consideration especially for the second sample, which is to a large degree affected by self-selection (interviewed persons are summer vacation returned migrants).

  15. 15.

    These results are based on a simple way of characterizing the migration premium across skills by reporting the distribution of the log wages earned by migrants abroad and those wages migrants would have received at home (imputed based on their observable characteristics). Averaging the two distributions using the density of skills of migrants and observing the difference would generate the average migration premium (Ambrosini et al. 2012).

  16. 16.

    The authors define the selection of migrants (positive or negative) as the difference in average skills between migrants and non-migrants. They call the wage-earning ability the skill of that group of workers.

  17. 17.

    This decrease was more visible for the number of remittances coming from the decrease in the south EU region (26 %) than in the north EU (17 %) or non-EU (7 %) countries. As Romanian migrants in the south EU countries are largely sent from Spain and Italy, this implies a significant drop in overall remittance values to the country (Soros Foundation Romania 2010).

  18. 18.

    The analysis is based on a pooled sample of 11,221 cases, extracted from four surveys that are representative for the entire adult population in Romania (May 2002, October 2002, October 2003 and May 2004) of the Public Opinion Barometer. About 5 % of the pooled sample (i.e., 427 observations), and of each survey (about 100 observations per survey) worked abroad.

  19. 19.

    A useful tool for the Romanian citizens working in Italy is the portal created by the Italian Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which started in January 2010 that makes it possible to compare the costs of different operators from money transfer domains, money sent from Italy to other countries (Feraru 2010).

  20. 20.

    Out of EUR 2800 million worth of total net private transfers, remittances from abroad (mainly from Italy, Spain, the USA, Greece, Germany and the United Kingdom) accounted for 78.5 %.

  21. 21.

    The average amount of remittances sent to Romania is about 2000 Euro per year (with about 1670 Euro from non-EU countries, 2139 Euro from north EU countries and 2188 Euro from south EU countries). The aforementioned low income and expenditure level, combined with a mid-range remittance value, is reflected in a mid-range Remittance to Savings Factor of 4.2:1 for Romania. This factor falls to just below that of Bosnia and Herzegovina (4.5:1), yet is almost four times the level in Moldova (1.2:1) (Soros Foundation Romania 2010).

  22. 22.

    The skilled labor force that emigrated from Romania in 1990 most frequently headed towards the USA (10.37 %), Hungary (4.86 %), Canada (4.56 %), France (1.58 %) and Austria (0.29 %). The skilled labor force that emigrated in 2000 mostly headed towards the USA (10.53 %), Canada (6.44 %), Germany (3.75 %), Hungary (3.10 %), France (1.68 %), Italy (0.91 %), Austria (0.70 %) and Spain (0.52 %) (OECD 2011).

  23. 23.

    A special Scholarship project intended for students wishing to undertake academic studies in a PhD or a Master degree at a foreign university, on the condition that they return to the country to work in a position in public administration, according to the obtained qualifications, for a defined period of time (1 year minimum).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden

    Daniela Andrén

  2. Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania

    Monica Roman

  3. Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn, Germany

    Monica Roman

  4. Central European Labour Studies Institute (CELSI), Bratislava, Slovakia

    Monica Roman

Authors
  1. Daniela Andrén
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  2. Monica Roman
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Correspondence to Daniela Andrén .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Public Policy, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

    Martin Kahanec

  2. IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor, Bonn, Germany

    Klaus F. Zimmermann

Appendix

Appendix

Table 1 Profile of Romanian migrants living in Spain
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Andrén, D., Roman, M. (2016). Should I Stay or Should I Go? Romanian Migrants During Transition and Enlargements. In: Kahanec, M., Zimmermann, K.F. (eds) Labor Migration, EU Enlargement, and the Great Recession. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45320-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45320-9_11

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