Highly Skilled Migration from Lithuania: A Critical Overview of the Period 1990-2018

Year 2019, Volume: 39 Issue: 2, 229 - 248, 31.12.2019

Liutauras Labanauskas

Abstract

Central and Eastern European countries have been undergoing political, social, and economic changes since 1990. The process of international migration has been a cause for concern in many other new European Union member states (Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania in particular). Drawing from a diversity of theoretical works, this paper will attempt to analyze highly skilled migration from Lithuania, an Eastern European country with one of the highest emigration rates in Europe. It will analyze the trends in highly-skilled migration from/to Lithuania over the period of 1990-2018. The Lithuanian phenomenon of highly skilled migration has been argued to signify a qualitative shift in migration policy, from migration seen as a threat to migration/mobility as the main prerequisite of the knowledge economy and development potential. Insights from this analysis may later be used to contribute to analyzing the migration phenomenon in a more comparative regional perspective, as similar structural changes have taken place among the populations and within the labor force of all Central and Eastern European countries. Declining population size, worsening demographic indicators, aging, and labor-force shortages (especially among professionals) have become more and more pronounced.

Keywords

Brain drain, Highly skilled migration, Lithuania

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