Empirica – Journal of European Economics

Sponsored by the Austrian Economic Association and the Austrian Institute of Economic Research

Empirica publishes empirical and theoretical work on all economic aspects of European Integration. The topics may range from all challenges concerning the deepening of the European Union (Single Market, Lisbon Agenda, EMU) to enlargement and the external relations of the EU (globalisation).

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Peter Huber, Stepan Mikula
Social capital and willingness to migrate in post-communist countries
in: Peter Huber, Dieter Pennerstorfer, Digitalization, Urban Sprawl and Regional Economics – Selected Papers of the 10th WIFO Regional Economics Workshop at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, Vienna, 25-26 September 2017
Empirica, 2019, 46(1), S.31-59, http://www.springer.com/10663
We analyse the correlation of various measures of social capital with the willingness to migrate in 28 post-communist and five western European comparison countries using the Life in Transition Survey. Memberships in clubs and civil society organisations are substantially lower in post-communist countries than in the Western European countries. This is mainly due to the cohorts socialised prior to political reforms in the 1990's. Differences in endowments with this measure of social capital explain around 2.5 percentage points of the 9 to 11 percentage point difference in the willingness to migrate between the post-communist and comparison countries. Differences in contacts to friends and family, by contrast, contribute only little to explaining these differences. Furthermore, despite clear cohort effects in endowments with social capital between cohorts socialised during and after communist rule, there is no clear evidence of such cohort effects in the impact of social capital on the willingness to migrate.
Keywords:Migration, Social capital, Transition countries
Forschungsbereich:Regionalökonomie und räumliche Analyse
Sprache:Englisch

Managing Editor

Univ.-Prof. MMag. Dr. Harald Oberhofer

Funktion: Ökonom (Senior Economist), Editor-in-Chief Empirica
Forschungsgruppe: Industrie-, Innovations- und internationale Ökonomie