COUNTRY BRAND IN THE MIGRATION PROCESS

Abstract

The article analysed the role of the country’s brand in shaping the country’s migration policy. The author checked hypotheses that countries with a strong brand have more favourable conditions for accumulating highly skilled labour and the growth of unwanted migration. The following variables were selected: the level of perception of the country’s brand by its stakeholders, calculated by the rating agency Future Brand; net migration index calculated by experts of the International Organization for Migration. Bibliometric analysis and VOSviewer software were used to identify trends in migration research; ANOVA model and EViews software were used to confirm the paper’s hypothesis for four clustered countries by the rating agency Future Brand. The bibliometric analysis of the evolution of the theory of migration management in the geographical dimension showed that the most powerful scientific alliances that investigate these issues are in the United States and Great Britain. Besides, scientists have started to focus on examining gender and age factors as the catalysator of migration. Furthermore, the results of the bibliometric analysis confirmed that the impact of the country’s image and brand on migration processes had been more actively studied since 2012. The findings confirmed the statistical significance of the difference in the levels of the net migration index between the countries’ groups «Countries» and «Status countries», «Experience countries», «Country brands», as well as between the countries of the group «Status countries» and «Experience countries». However, the hypothesis on the statistically significant difference between the groups of countries «Status countries» and «Country brands» for the net migration index was not confirmed. Keywords: country image, brand, immigrants, migration, emigrants, labor resources, intellectual capital.