A Eurobarometer study shows that only about 1 % of the population of the new Member States intends to move to western Europe to study and work.
The new study from the European Foundation for the Improvement in Living and Working Conditions, shows that the typical potential migrants are young, educated to tertiary level, or still studying, and living as a single person with no dependents. There is an increasing tendency for them to be female, particularly in growing sectors such as healthcare and social services.
For acceding and candidate countries this is the prospect of a major ’youth drain’ and potential ’brain drain’. The sending countries are in danger of losing between 3% and 5% of people with third level education and more than 10% of their students.
For the acceding and candidate countries, this is a significant challenge to improve economic and social performance, because the main motivations for migration of younger, well qualified people are better quality of life and better income prospects in the ’old’ EU Member States.
This raises important issues for EU programmes and instruments designed to support accession, in particular, for Bulgaria and Romania but also for other potential candidate countries in the Balkans.
The survey was conducted in Spring 2002 in the 13 acceeding and candidate countries with a sample size of 1000 people per country, except Malta and Cyprus (500) and Poland and Turkey (2000).
