emigration trends and challenges in the framework of european economic integration

The research performed within the paper aims to highlight the importance of labour mobility within the European Union in the deepening context of the European integration process. The EU expansion strategy focuses on an intensified cooperation process with EU’s Eastern neighbours which includes both EU candidates, like Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, as well as other countries that take part in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) developed by the EU in 2009. This partnership has the main purpose to ensure an institutional framework for debates on joint economic and political issues for all involved partners that may lead to grating them the EU membership statute in the future. Within this perspective, the European integration process and the EU expansion which involves the possibility to expand the free movement of workers from the Eastern countries towards Western Europe, brings out numerous talks on least sensitive and controversial aspects of labour mobility. Moreover, the current refugee crisis confronting Europe points out the necessity to implement accurate strategies and policies for labour market integration of immigrants and asylum seekers, thus transforming the potential negative effects into positive externalities on economic growth. Therefore, our study focuses on the effects generated by emigration on sending economies in terms of labour market outcomes and GDP increases, mainly through remittances. We took into account the latest EU enlargements in 2007 (Romania and Bulgaria) and 2013 (Croatia), thus assessing the emigration impact upon these labour exporting countries during the 2000-2014 period. The developed macroeconometric models take the form of SEM models used for the combined and mediated analysis of the shaping factors of emigration stocks and their economic consequences, which were processed through the MLE method. Moreover, we performed in-sample and out-of-sample predictions of the emigration stocks and remittances for the three countries considered within the panel up until 2020. The results show that wage differentials are extremely important for the migration decision, thus shaping the emigrant stock, along with the labour market outcomes and education, while remittances generate positive effects on sending economies, leading to an increase in total output.