Costs And Benefits Of Labour Mobility Between The Eu And The Eastern Partnership Partner Countries

Ukraine is a migration-intensive country, with an estimated 1.5-2 million labour migrants (about 5% of the working-age population). Slightly over a half of these migrants travel for work to the EU. This study discusses the impact of this large pool of migrants on both the sending and receiving countries. It also assesses how liberalisation of the EU visa regime, something that the EU is currently negotiating with Ukraine, will affect the stream of Ukrainian labour migrants to EU countries. Our study suggests that the number of tourists will increase substantially, whereas the increase in the number of labour migrants is unlikely to be very large. We also suggest that the number of legal migrants is likely to increase, but at the same time the number of illegal migrants will decline because currently only a third of migrants from Ukraine have both residence and work permits in the EU, while about a quarter of them stay there illegally. Over the last 20 years Ukraine has experienced market-oriented political and economic reforms, although they have not been as thorough as in other Eastern European countries. Many of the reforms were late or incomplete and did not achieve the expected results. For example, privatisation is generally believed to be a process whereby an inefficient owner (the state) is replaced by a more efficient one (private). In Ukraine, this was the case for the majority of small and medium enterprises. However, very few private owners of large enterprises have increased enterprise efficiency to the expected level by introducing new technologies; instead, they have mostly relied on ties with the government and cheap labour and energy as their main competitive advantages.