18. Brain drain, brain gain: the socioeconomic and political consequences of human capital circulation across Europe

Stefano Ronchi (University of Milan)

Maria Giulia Montanari (University of Milan - Bicocca) 

Anna Kyriazi (University of Milan) 

The EU social investment strategy puts the stress on investments in human capital to boost labour market opportunities at the individual level while reconciling economic growth and social inclusion at the macro level. EU member states, however, differ widely with respect to their capacity to both create and absorb human capital (Afonso and Devitt 2016; Kazepov and Ranci 2017). Given this heterogeneity, freedom of movement – one of the lynchpins of EU integration – translates into inequalities in human capital circulation across the Member States (Eurofound 2024; Kyriazi et al. 2023; European Commission 2023). While freedom of movement should foster prosperity and narrow disparities between Member States, imbalanced human capital circulation raises important challenges. To be sure, migration may improve the lives of individual emigrants and also benefit the economies of receiving countries (so called brain gain) as well as sending countries (e.g. remittances). However, migrating does not always lead to upward social mobility, and the overqualification levels among migrants raise issues of human capital waste in Europe (Montanari and Meraviglia 2024). Moreover, from the perspective of sending countries brain drain may also entail several losses in terms of missing returns on educational investments (Grabowska 2021; Eurofound 2024), worsening demographic prospects, skill shortages, tax base erosion, and, overall, a weakening of labour markets and welfare systems (Alcidi and Gros 2019; Fries-Tersch et al. 2020), with potential negative externalities for the EU as a whole (Roos 2021).  

This stream aims to collect contributions on the various facets of inequalities in human capital circulation across the EU—a topic on which research is still much needed.  

The aspects on which we would like to draw the attention of the ESPAnet research community are in particular (but not exclusively):

- the quantification of the gains and losses connected to (especially high-skill) human capital migration;

- the individual opportunities and costs entailed by migrating in Europe, diversified according to the area of origin and destination;

- national and supranational policies to attract, retain or facilitate the return of human capital;

- the political consequences of in-/outflows of human capital in terms of electoral and policy preferences. 

We welcome contributions based on either quantitative or qualitative methods, focused on single case studies or cross-country comparisons.