Abstract
Free movement of persons is one of the fundamental values and achievements of the European Union, however, intentions towards mobility vary across and within the member states. Economic literature has remarkable theories to explain migration flows and individual selection factors of potential migrants, but it ignores major achievements of other social sciences. This paper builds an economic framework to incorporate the Hirschmanian concept of loyalty into the microeconomic (human capital) model of international migration by using interdependent preferences. Hirschman assumes that even after exiting, loyal people care about their previous communities, thus it imposes a certain psychological ‘exit tax’ on them. Based on this concept, it is hypothesized that people with altruistic motives have weaker intentions to migrate, so the presence of loyalty towards others makes international migration less likely, conveying that loyalty towards local or national community may be responsible for moderate labor mobility among EU member states. Results show that attachment to one's country makes one's intention to move abroad in the near future less likely, while loyalty towards one's city has more moderate impact on their intentions.
Highlights
Nowadays, international migration is an important and current issue both at a European and a global level
This paper focused on the determinants of individual migration decisions
Neoclassical human capital theory of migration has major achievements in this field, its explanatory power is unsatisfactory since it ignores many psychological aspects of the decision as well as the well-known fact that people feel like belonging to a certain community
Summary
International migration is an important and current issue both at a European and a global level. Thanks to immense technological progress, the costs of mobility have dropped dramatically (Hoffmann 2010), and this was not accompanied by a similar decrease in international development disparities Various schools of the migration literature explain causes and main driving forces of migration differently (see Massey et al 1993), none of them deny the importance of international disparities and the income gap, as well as the influential role of mobility costs. This implies that circumstances outlined above make migration a viable alternative for more and more people living in less developed countries. Society and Economy 42 (2020) Unauthenticated | Downloaded 11/02/21 12:21 PM UTC
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