Human capital mobility patterns in the European Union and the financial crisis

This paper provides new evidence on the quantification of economic losses and/or gains from skilled human capital mobility in terms of GDP and productivity in several EU countries during and after the Great Recession. We construct two novel indicators to quantify and compare the economic effects of human capital mobility across EU countries in 2008, 2012, and 2016. Through hierarchical clustering, we created groups of countries to perform a non-parametric MANOVA. The results suggest the existence of three groups of countries aggregated by similar economic and mobility patterns. The differences between these groups are significant and allow us to delineate the countries’ gains and losses.