How posting shapes a hybrid single European labour market

Abstract

Some scholars argue that intra-EU labour migration improves the allocation of human capital in Europe and that labour mobility is still too low to constitute a single European labour market. Others insist that free movement of labour and services makes employment more precarious and causes wage dumping. Less attention has been given to the origins, destinations and nature of flows of posted workers, partly because data on posting are scarce. We aim to fill this gap by exploring unique posting data for Belgium. We argue that while the free movement of labour and a single European labour market have been policy goals for decades, it is the free movement of services that is shaping a hybrid single European labour market, since high levels of short-term service mobility are more significant than long-term labour migration. This is as much a phenomenon of intra-EU15 mobility as of post-accession mobility, and is set to remain more prevalent than classic free movement of labour.