Migration and Labor Market Integration in Europe

摘要

We are still far from a common European labor market. In a 2014 survey conducted by the German think tank IZA, among 284 European labor econo¬mists, nearly three-quarters disagreed with the statement that "the single European labor market is largely achieved" (Krause-Pilatus, Rinne, and Zimmermann 2014). Despite the removal of legal barriers to labor mobility, large differences in labor market outcomes across European countries remain. Of course, most domestic labor markets-including the US labor market-are segmented into geographic local labor markets where localized shocks can lead to fairly persistent differentials in wage and unemployment levels (Moretti 2011; Autor, Dorn, and Hanson 2021). However, migration rates within the European labor market are much smaller than in the United States, despite larger geographic differentials in labor market outcomes across European regions, and notwith¬standing that Europe covers a larger population distributed over a much smaller land area. As noted, some of the remaining obstacles to a more integrated European labor market include heterogeneity of Europe in terms of languages and cultures; national regulations related to education, training, and employment conditions; and discrimination against migrants.