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Return and labour status at home: evidence from returnees in Albania

2009; Routledge; Volume: 9; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14683850903314998

1743-9639

Etleva Gërmenji, Lindita Milo,

Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

Abstract This paper looks at three issues related to return migration in Albania. First, do returnees transfer human and/or financial capital upon return? Second, what determines their post‐return position in the Albanian labour market? And third, is there any developmental impact of return migration? The analysis utilizes a database attained from a survey of returnees, conducted by European Training Foundation in Albania in 2006 ETF (European Training Foundation). 2006. Labor market review of Albania, Torino: ETF. [Google Scholar]. Our findings suggest that Albanian returnees do transfer financial capital and to a lesser extent human capital upon return. They are investing back home but mostly after completion of a process of accumulation of money and skills. Our findings, however, also combined with the existing empirical evidence, do not point to the existence of any obvious link between return migration and the country's economic development up to now. Keywords: Albanialabour marketmultinominal logitreturn migration Acknowledgements We are grateful to the participants of the conference on ‘Migration and Development in Albania and Western Balkans’ held in Durrës (Albania) on 26–27 September 2008 and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments, as well as to Mr Ilir Gedeshi for providing us with the data and all the clarifications needed. Notes 1. Findings from the Albanian Living Standards Measurement Survey (ALSMS) data indicated that, by 2005, one in three Albanian households had had at least one episode of temporary migration since 1990 (World Bank 2007 World Bank. 2007. Albania: Urban growth, migration and poverty reduction. A poverty assessment, Tirana: World Bank Country Office. [Google Scholar]). 2. For more details on the methodological approach of the survey, see the ETF (2007 ETF. 2007. Contribution of human resources development to migration policy in Albania, Torino: ETF. [Google Scholar]) report. 3. Controlling for this would require having data on migrants who still reside in emigration countries, collection of which was out of the scope of the EFT study. 4. When returnees were involved in more then one job/occupation, they were asked to describe the main one. From experts who monitored the survey, we were told, however, that these cases were very sporadic. 5. We experimented with several grouping alternatives. One was to collapse the first and the second occupations under ‘wage‐earner’, the third and the fourth as ‘self‐employed’ and the fifth and the sixth under ‘not‐working’. Another was to collapse the first and the sixth occupations under ‘not‐working’. The results obtained from the empirical analysis (available upon request) were, however, not significantly different: the estimates were slightly different but the level of significance not. 6. By combining information on returnee's age and length of period spent abroad, it seems that at least 12 of them proceeded from an Albanian secondary school diploma to a foreign university degree. 7. The labour market for agricultural work is very thin in Albania (Miluka et al. 2007 Miluka, J., Carleto, G., Davis, B. and Zezza, A. 2007. “The vanishing farms: The impact of international migration on Albanian family farming”. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 4367[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 8. Dustmann and Kirchkamp (2002 Dustmann, C. and Kirchkamp, O. 2002. The optimal migration duration and the activity choice after re‐migration. Journal of Development Economics, 67(2): 351–72. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) argue that migration duration and activity choice upon return can be jointly chosen. If this is the case, then the regression results would suffer from an endogeneity bias. Ideally, we could control for potential endogeneity by adopting an instrumental variable approach. Unfortunately, because of data limitations, we do not have any good instrument that would predict the duration of migration spell but would not have any effect on a returnee's activity choice in Albania. Therefore, although aware of the potential endogeneity problem, we have no other choice but to stick to our multinominal logit approach. 9. It is important to mention here that returnees benefited only from the training opportunities that were simply offered to them. They never had the chance to make a choice on the type of training they would want or the length of it. 10. As was mentioned earlier in this paper, we cannot check for the possible effects of returnees' experiences, locations, etc., before migration.