The Impact of the Recent Migration from Eastern Europe on the UK Economy

By David G. Blanchflower, Jumana Saleheen, Chris Shadforth. Social Science Research Network, 2007

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

UK population growth over the last thirty-five years has been remarkably low in comparison with other countries; the population grew by just 7% between 1971 and 2004, less than all the other EU15 countries except Germany. The UK population has grown at a faster pace since the turn of the millennium driven primarily by changes in net migration, and in particular from an influx of migrants from eight East European (A8) countries. There appears to be consistent evidence from the Worker Registration Scheme and National Insurance Number applications that approximately 500,000 migrants from the A8 countries had come to work in the UK between May 2004 and late 2006. But other sources suggest approximately half of these workers have likely returned to their country of origin. We argue that, at present, it appears that A8 immigration has tended to increase supply by more than it has increased demand in the UK (in the short run). This migration flow, we argue, has acted to reduce inflationary pressures and to lower the natural rate of unemployment.

Subfields: Gender Studies, General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/93c2658f4e74752455c9a8cdf05b0fdbccc24784

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Citations in the corpus

Lessons from Migration after EU Enlargement (2009, background): “…find no impact of the recent immigration from the new member states on the UK unemployment rate or wages, even after controlling for potential observable and unobservable confounding factors in an econometric analysis (see Gilpin et al., 2006; Blanchflower et al., 2007; Lemos and Portes, 2008).”
Fear, Unemployment and Migration (2009, unknown): “17 For further details of these surveys see Blanchflower et al. (2007).”
Migration in an Enlarged EU: A Challenging Solution? (2009, background): “As for the 2007 enlargement, ten EU25 member states (the Czech Republic, Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden) liberalised the access of Bulgarian and Romanian workers to their labour markets during the first phase.6”
Life (Dis)Satisfaction and the Intention to Migrate: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe (2014, background): “[7] and Blanchflower & Shadforth [8] analyze the migration flows from Central and Eastern Europe to the UK and find that the number of migrants is higher from the countries in which GDP per capita and average life satisfaction are lower.”
EU Enlargement and Migration: Assessing the Macroeconomic Impacts (2010, methodology): “2 For Ireland and the UK the total numbers are based on the Irish Quarterly National Household Survey and the UK Labour Force Survey data, the latter as reported in Blanchflower et al. (2007), which sample resident households at quarterly intervals.”
Return migration: the experience of Eastern Europe (2012, unknown): “10 if y i b1 if b1 y i b2 if b9 y i (3)”