The impact of EU labour mobility on the Member States of the EU

Expected outcome

Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Policymakers gain insights into the economic and social effects of worker mobility across the EU, including effects on wages, fiscal budgets, and social systems for both sending and receiving regions.
• The benefits of mobility are maximised through actionable recommendations, which consider challenges such as demographic changes, regional effects, digitalisation and, to a suitable extent, further developments such as the green transition or adaptation to climate change (including its potential impact on the economic development and the attractiveness of regions) or the green transition and discussions around the accession of further countries to the EU and wider geopolitical instabilities.

Scope

While the EU facilitates free movement as one of the four freedoms of the single market, the long-term social and economic dynamics and implications for both receiving and, especially, sending regions remain underexplored. These include not only direct effects on fiscal and social budgets but also more subtle impacts, such as on the networks, skills, and experiences that individuals bring back to their home regions, but also on the income distribution in the country from which the movers originate.

Gaining a deeper, data-supported understanding of these diverse often complex effects is crucial for shaping policies that effectively harness the benefits of mobility across Europe. In doing so the research shall contribute to the ongoing efforts of strengthening the internal market and make Europe more competitive, while also ensuring social fairness and delivering on the European Pillar of Social Rights, in particular with regard to fair working conditions and ensuring access to adequate income and social protection for all. For the variations across different groups (including - but not limited to - gender, age, level of qualification) could be explored. Harnessing the benefits of mobility is also to be seen in the wider context of the green and digital transitions, necessitating enhanced labour mobility to address skill mismatches and shortages and demographic challenges.

Proposals should build on relevant previous research (including from SSH disciplines), some of which has been conducted in previous Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 projects. Proposals should have a clear focus. Quantitative approaches and/or econometrics should be part of the proposed methodology. Approaches which can capture developments over time, such as panel analysis, might thereby be of added value.

Projects should analyse the effects of labour mobility on the functioning of social security systems (eventually differentiating between the different pillars of the social security systems, e.g. pension system, health, care, etc.) in countries of origin and destination and their coordination and/or provide research which fosters an informed debate on potential strategies for a future-proof and efficient EU-level social security coordination.

Beyond that, the projects may:

• Explore ways to improve the quantification of the volume of various forms [e.g. long-term movers, seasonal work and other forms of short-term mobility, postings, cross-border (tele-)work etc] of labour mobility and/or make available figures more comparable across Member States.
• Develop economic models to assess the EU-level economic effects of labour mobility.
• Pay attention to the ecological effects of labour mobility and link those with the socio-economic effects.
• Analyse whether and in which way the composition of movers (e.g. skill-level, age structure, status in labour market, etc.) matters for the socio-economic effects observed in the countries/regions of origin/destination.
• Provide a comparative analysis of intra-EU labour mobility with labour mobility in other world regions or to geographical mobility within Member States.
• Develop and test a model to forecast labour mobility in different scenarios (e.g. making assumptions about the economic and social development in different parts of the EU).
• Take an evidence-based position whether – and in which way - geographical mobility contributes to manage economic change (e.g. whether movers are more willing to work in another sector).
• Analyse to which extent and under which conditions regions with net-outward mobility have benefited or can benefit – eventually in the longer run – from this mobility.
• Investigate the economic and social differences between labour migration and labour mobility, the experience with EU enlargement might be used to analyse this.
• Provide evidence on which policy instruments are most suitable to ensure a labour mobility which is not perceived as unfair (e.g linked to exploitation, social dumping etc.).

These aspects illustrate thematic areas which could contribute to the objective of developing a vision for the future of labour mobility in the European Union and to discuss how legal and institutional frameworks can be adapted to support mobility in a way that is both economically and socially beneficial. This includes modernising the coordination of social security and ensuring that policies reflect the realities of modern society and work arrangements.

Where applicable, proposals should leverage the data and services available through European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as well as data from relevant Data Spaces. Particular efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of this topic is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable).

[1] See e.g. HORIZON-CL2-2022-TRANSFORMATIONS-01-02 - The impact of spatial mobility on European demographics, society, welfare system and labour market; https://publications.europa.eu/resource/cellar/a9351b1c-4d31-11ee-9220-01aa75ed71a1.0001.03/DOC_1 ; https://publications.europa.eu/resource/cellar/d697ee14-77ad-11ea-a07e-01aa75ed71a1.0001.01/DOC_1 ; https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/727072 ; https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/794030