Intra-EU Migration From Slovakia: An Evaluation Of New Economics Of Labour Migration And Migrant Networks Theories

This paper focuses on migration from Slovakia in the context of migration from the 10 countries which became European Union members in May 2004. While on the aggregate level these migration flows confirm the basic assumptions of the neoclassic migration theory, this study tests if insights from the new economics of labour migration (NELM) and migrant network theory are confirmed by those movements. Contrary to Mexico–US migration, such theory evaluation is rather rare in European migration research which is probably caused by the requirement of detailed and reliable datasets. We try to overcome this inconvenience by using Labour Force Survey data. Those data include the necessary information about the households of migrants that can be used to test for predicted interactions. We show on post 2004 labour migration from Slovakia that foreign employment of a household member creates remittance flows and, as expected by the NELM theory, improves the income situation of the household. However, remittances are produced only if the migrating household members are in the position of parents. This finding has consequences for remittance estimations as most of the post accession migration are single young migrants. The existence of intra- and trans-generational migrant networks is also confirmed by our multivariate analysis. While both types of network effects are gender specific, the gender factor seems to be stronger in the case of trans-generational networks. Besides the strong and significant influence of networks that increase the odds of migration to a destination where migrant family members are present, we found preliminary evidence of a ‘culture of migration’ in the households of migrants.