Acta Univ. Agric. Silvic. Mendelianae Brun. 2013, 61(7), 2603-2610 | DOI: 10.11118/actaun201361072603

International migration and unemployment in established member countries of the European Union

Milan Palát

Department of Territorial Studies, Mendel University in Brno, Zemědělská 1, 613 00 Brno, Czech Republic

The objective of the paper is to evaluate relationships of the rate of migration and the unemployment rate in established member countries of the European Union covering also the period of the last financial and economic crisis and using statistical methods. To determine parameters of a regression function were used methods of regression and correlation analysis including testing the statistical significance. Nearly all countries (except Luxemburg and Austria) show a negative linear relationship between tested indicators however not always statistically significant. Based on these results, the existence of correlation is evident between the crude rate of net migration and the unemployment rate in more than a half of the monitored countries. Calculated correlation indices show highly statistically significant results for typically immigrant's destination countries, e.g. Germany, United Kingdom, Luxembourg, and Belgium but we can find statistically significant results also in countries which are facing enormous economic problems during the last financial and economic crisis, esp. in Ireland, Spain and Italy. With an exemption of Belgium, the selected type of regression function doesn't play a role as it regards the statistical significance of correlation indices and the use of polynomials of higher degrees doesn't improve those results significantly. The analysis of the crude rate of net migration and the unemployment rate presented in this paper can be further used and developed when other variables would be added to the model.

Keywords: crude rate of net migration, established member countries, unemployment, correlation

Grants and funding:

The paper was prepared thanks to the support from MSM 6215648904 "Česká ekonomika v procesech integrace a globalizace a vývoj agrárního sektoru a sektoru služeb v nových podmínkách evropského integrovaného trhu".

Received: July 1, 2013; Published: December 24, 2013  Show citation