Publication: Intentions to Return : Evidence from Romanian Migrants
Loading...
Published
2015-01
ISSN
Date
2015-02-03
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Romania faces an acute population crisis with an aging workforce and an increased number of emigrants particularly from the young, highly educated/skilled population. This paper uses a new cross-sectional data set of Romanian emigrants to find which factors are related to plans to return home permanently. The analysis pays particular attention to differences in expected earnings and skills and training acquired as a migrant. The study finds that higher expected earnings in Romania and investment in Romanian firms are positively correlated with plans to return migrate. Policies that boost productivity and therefore wages as well as policies that improve the business climate could therefore encourage Romanian migrants to return to Romania, moderating the negative consequences of the declining and aging population, and increasing the skill stock of the Romanian labor force.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Hinks, Tim; Davies, Simon. 2015. Intentions to Return : Evidence from Romanian Migrants. Policy Research Working Paper;No. 7166. © http://hdl.handle.net/10986/21386 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Intergenerational Income Mobility around the World(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-09)This paper introduces a new global database with estimates of intergenerational income mobility for 87 countries, covering 84 percent of the world’s population. This marks a notable expansion of the cross-country evidence base on income mobility, particularly among low- and middle-income countries. The estimates indicate that the negative association between income mobility and inequality (known as the Great Gatsby Curve) continues to hold across this wider range of countries. The database also reveals a positive association between income mobility and national income per capita, suggesting that countries achieve higher levels of intergenerational mobility as they grow richer.Publication International Activity and Female Labor Participation: New Evidence for Services Firms in Developing Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-03)Using a cross-section of more than 33,000 services firms in 104 low- and middle-income countries from the World Bank’s Enterprise Surveys, this paper examines whether the female labor share premium of international firms relative to non-international firms in manufacturing also holds for services firms. Unlike the manufacturing sector, the paper finds a negative relationship between exporting and global value chain participation and the female labor share for services firms, while no relationship is found for importing or foreign ownership status, controlling for firm output, productivity, technology intensity, and fixed effects. The female labor share gap for exporters was larger before COVID-19, and the gap for global value chain participants is no longer significant after COVID-19. Controlling for sectoral relative wages between men and women does not change the findings in a smaller subsample of economies. Controlling for female top management and ownership reveals a female labor share gap for exporters, global value chain participants, and importers. Using an alternative estimator and data set confirms the female labor share gap in services firms. This may be attributed to the sectoral segregation between women and men, with women tending to pursue work opportunities in less skill- and export-intensive services sectors compared to men.Publication Children in Monetary Poor Households: Global, Regional, and Select National Trends in the Progress against Child Poverty(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-05)This paper presents the first estimates of extreme child poverty and child poverty using the World Bank’s recently revised international poverty lines. Using the international poverty line of $3.00 per day and the higher $8.30 per day poverty line (both expressed in 2021 purchasing power parity), the paper provides new results of the global and regional trends over 2014–24. The estimates show that 19.2 percent of children, approximately 412 million children, were living on less than $3.00 (2021 PPP) per day as of 2024, a reduction from 507 million children in 2014. This long-term decrease was slower than that for the general population. At the higher line of $8.30, the child poverty rate in 2024 was 65.9 percent, representing around 1.4 billion children, a drop from the 73.1 percent registered in 2014. At the regional level, the East Asia and Pacific and South Asia regions witnessed significant reductions in child poverty and extreme child poverty between 2014 and 2024, and the Europe and Central Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean regions showed reductions mostly in child poverty. In the same period, there was an increase in extreme child poverty in the Middle East and North Africa region. Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a “lost decade” of child poverty reduction between 2014 and 2024, increasing its concentration of global poverty. In 2024, Sub-Saharan Africa hosted more than three-quarters of children in extreme poor households (more than 311 million children), although its share of the global child population was around 23 percent. Country-level results show evidence of regional heterogeneity in progress against extreme child poverty.Publication Engineering Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-29)As Ukraine emerges from the devastation of war, it faces a historic opportunity to engineer its own Wirtschaftswunder—a productivity-driven economic transformation akin to post-war West Germany. While investment-led growth may offer quick wins, it is efficiency, innovation, and institutional reform that will determine Ukraine’s long-term economic trajectory. Drawing on rich micro-level firm data spanning 25 years, this paper uncovers deep structural distortions that have suppressed creative destruction and productivity in Ukraine. It finds that business dynamism is on the decline, alongside rising market concentration among incumbent businesses, including low productivity state owned enterprises. To inform priorities for reviving business dynamism, this study develops a model of creative destruction drawing on Acemoglu et al. (2018) and Akcigit et al. (2021). The quantitative assessment highlights that policies that discipline entrenched incumbents are the bedrock for reviving business dynamism and engineer Ukraine’s Wirtschaftswunder. Policies targeting specific types of firms have limited efficacy when incumbents run wild.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication International Migration, Economic Development and Policy(Washington, DC: World Bank and Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)This volume reflects the expansion of the World Bank Research Program on International Migration and Development into new substantive and geographic areas. It presents a new global migration database and includes studies of the determinants and impact of return and circular migration, the impact of the flow of ideas on fertility, host country policies and their impact on immigrants, and the impact of international migration and remittances on poverty and other development indicators. The studies cover countries from Latin America, North Africa, South Asia, the South Pacific, and Western Europe, and show that the impact of migration on education and health tends to benefit girls more than boys, that its impact on labor force participation tends to be stronger for women than men, that return migrants tend to do better than non-migrants, and that fertility has tended to decline in countries whose migration has been to the West and has failed to do so in countries whose migration has been to the Gulf. The purpose of the case studies is to illustrate and clarify many theoretical mechanisms and to advance understanding of the impact of different migration policies, given that introducing policy variables in econometric regressions is generally difficult. Each study in this volume aims to answer a variety of development- and policy-related questions using the most appropriate of these three methodologies. These empirical studies and analyses include exploration of some novel hypotheses; they are also new in terms of the topics selected and the regions/ countries examinedPublication Informing Migration Policies : A Data Primer(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-11)Researchers in many fields, such as demography, economics, and sociology, have established various data collection methodologies and principles to answer a range of academic and policy questions on migration. Although the progress has been impressive, some basic challenges remain. This paper addresses some basic, yet fundamental, questions on identification of international migrants and how their various demographic, personal, and human capital characteristics are captured via different data sources. The critical issues are the construction of proper sampling frames in censuses, registers, and surveys and the design of questionnaires in household, labor market, and other relevant surveys. The paper discusses how these data sources can be used to answer policy questions in areas such as labor markets, education, or poverty. The focus is on how some of the existing shortcomings in availability, quality, and relevance of migration data can be overcome via improvements in data collection methods.Publication Wage Effects of High-Skilled Migration : International Evidence(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01)The international migration of high-skilled workers may trigger productivity effects at the macro level such that the wage rate of skilled workers increases in host countries and decrease in source countries. The authors exploit data on international bilateral migration flows and provide evidence consistent with this theoretical hypothesis. They propose various instrumentation strategies to identify the causal effect of skilled migration on log differences of GDP per capita, total factor productivity, and the wages of skilled workers between pairs of source and destination countries. These strategies aim to address the endogeneity problem that arises when international wage differences affect migration decisions.Publication Migration and Skills : The Experience of Migrant Workers from Albania, Egypt, Moldova, and Tunisia(World Bank, 2010)The subject of migration, and how best to manage it, has been moving up the policy agenda of the European Union for some time now. Faced with an aging population, possible skills shortages at all skills levels, and the need to compete for highly skilled migrants with countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, the European Union (EU) is moving from seeing migration as a problem or a threat to viewing it as an opportunity. As an EU agency promoting skills and human capital development in transition and developing countries, the European Training Foundation (ETF) wished to explore the impact of migration on skills development, with a special emphasis on Diasporas and returning migrants. For the World Bank, the issue of migration forms an integral part of its approach to social protection, since it believes that labor-market policy must take into account the national as well the international dimensions of skilled labor mobility. Both institutions were keen to look at what changes need to be made to migration policy in order to achieve a triple-win situation, one that can benefit both sending and receiving countries as well as the migrants themselves. This report aims to unravel the complex relationship between migration and skills development. It paints a precise picture of potential and returning migrants from four very different countries, Albania, the Arab Republic of Egypt, Moldova, and Tunisia, that is a conscious choice of two 'traditional' (Egypt, Tunisia) and two 'new' (Albania, Moldova) sending countries, and describes the skills they possess and the impact that the experience of migration has on their skills development. It is harder to draw accurate conclusions on the link between job aspirations and current employment status, since many of the potential migrants were not actively employed at the time of the interview. However, the data suggest people did expect to change jobs as a result of migration, and the sectors they expected to work in varied according to their nationality. Focusing solely on those planning to move to the EU, many Albanians expected to work in domestic service, hospitality, and construction; Egyptians expected to work in hospitality and construction; Moldovans expected to work in domestic service and construction; and Tunisians expected to work in hospitality and manufacturing. Few migrants working in agriculture or petty trade aimed to work in these same sectors while abroad.Publication Shaping the Future : A Long-Term Perspective of People and Job Mobility in the Middle East and North Africa(Washington, DC, 2009-01)The objective of this study is to provide a long-term perspective for the ongoing policy dialogue on the management of labor migration in Europe and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. It is organized as follows. Chapter one puts the report and migration in the context of the economic and social development in MENA countries. Chapter two provides the historical context of MENA migration patterns and an overview of the presence and skill characteristics of migrants in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries today. This chapter also discusses the potential for insourcing, that is, migration of jobs into the region as an alternative or complement to labor migration. Chapter three analyzes the demand and supply framework for migration, the determinants of migration patterns, and the potential demand for labor in the European Union (EU), and the characteristics and trends of MENA labor supply. Chapter four looks to the worldwide impact of demographic and labor force developments in the decades ahead and their implications on labor and job mobility. The chapter analyzes the likely population and labor force growth in Europe and MENA, the challenges this growth poses, and the scope for demographic arbitrage between the two regions. This chapter provides the basis for the fifth and concluding chapter. Chapter five covers the institutional setup and the various economic and social protection policies and practices worldwide that have a strong and positive bearing on migration flows and presents a conceptual framework on both the labor and job sending and receiving sides that can be used by policy makers to articulate, defend, and implement a collaborative approach to the challenges ahead.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication World Development Report 2006(Washington, DC, 2005)This year’s Word Development Report (WDR), the twenty-eighth, looks at the role of equity in the development process. It defines equity in terms of two basic principles. The first is equal opportunities: that a person’s chances in life should be determined by his or her talents and efforts, rather than by pre-determined circumstances such as race, gender, social or family background. The second principle is the avoidance of extreme deprivation in outcomes, particularly in health, education and consumption levels. This principle thus includes the objective of poverty reduction. The report’s main message is that, in the long run, the pursuit of equity and the pursuit of economic prosperity are complementary. In addition to detailed chapters exploring these and related issues, the Report contains selected data from the World Development Indicators 2005‹an appendix of economic and social data for over 200 countries. This Report offers practical insights for policymakers, executives, scholars, and all those with an interest in economic development.Publication Lebanon Economic Monitor, Fall 2022(Washington, DC, 2022-11)The economy continues to contract, albeit at a somewhat slower pace. Public finances improved in 2021, but only because spending collapsed faster than revenue generation. Testament to the continued atrophy of Lebanon’s economy, the Lebanese Pound continues to depreciate sharply. The sharp deterioration in the currency continues to drive surging inflation, in triple digits since July 2020, impacting the poor and vulnerable the most. An unprecedented institutional vacuum will likely further delay any agreement on crisis resolution and much needed reforms; this includes prior actions as part of the April 2022 International Monetary Fund (IMF) staff-level agreement (SLA). Divergent views among key stakeholders on how to distribute the financial losses remains the main bottleneck for reaching an agreement on a comprehensive reform agenda. Lebanon needs to urgently adopt a domestic, equitable, and comprehensive solution that is predicated on: (i) addressing upfront the balance sheet impairments, (ii) restoring liquidity, and (iii) adhering to sound global practices of bail-in solutions based on a hierarchy of creditors (starting with banks’ shareholders) that protects small depositors.Publication The Journey Ahead(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-31)The Journey Ahead: Supporting Successful Migration in Europe and Central Asia provides an in-depth analysis of international migration in Europe and Central Asia (ECA) and the implications for policy making. By identifying challenges and opportunities associated with migration in the region, it aims to inform a more nuanced, evidencebased debate on the costs and benefits of cross-border mobility. Using data-driven insights and new analysis, the report shows that migration has been an engine of prosperity and has helped address some of ECA’s demographic and socioeconomic disparities. Yet, migration’s full economic potential remains untapped. The report identifies multiple barriers keeping migration from achieving its full potential. Crucially, it argues that policies in both origin and destination countries can help maximize the development impacts of migration and effectively manage the economic, social, and political costs. Drawing from a wide range of literature, country experiences, and novel analysis, The Journey Ahead presents actionable policy options to enhance the benefits of migration for destination and origin countries and migrants themselves. Some measures can be taken unilaterally by countries, whereas others require close bilateral or regional coordination. The recommendations are tailored to different types of migration— forced displacement as well as high-skilled and low-skilled economic migration—and from the perspectives of both sending and receiving countries. This report serves as a comprehensive resource for governments, development partners, and other stakeholders throughout Europe and Central Asia, where the richness and diversity of migration experiences provide valuable insights for policy makers in other regions of the world.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication Argentina Country Climate and Development Report(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11)The Argentina Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) explores opportunities and identifies trade-offs for aligning Argentina’s growth and poverty reduction policies with its commitments on, and its ability to withstand, climate change. It assesses how the country can: reduce its vulnerability to climate shocks through targeted public and private investments and adequation of social protection. The report also shows how Argentina can seize the benefits of a global decarbonization path to sustain a more robust economic growth through further development of Argentina’s potential for renewable energy, energy efficiency actions, the lithium value chain, as well as climate-smart agriculture (and land use) options. Given Argentina’s context, this CCDR focuses on win-win policies and investments, which have large co-benefits or can contribute to raising the country’s growth while helping to adapt the economy, also considering how human capital actions can accompany a just transition.