Chapter 3 Economic Aspects of Ukrainian Migration to EU Countries

Two main phases can be identified in the development of economic migration research in Ukraine. In the 1990s to mid-2000s, descriptive or qualitative studies by demographers, sociologists and other researchers focused predominantly on emigration trends, and migration policy analysis was based on administrative statistics on residential migration, small-scale surveys of migrants or anecdotal evidence (e.g. Pirozhkov et al. 1997; 2003; Pribytkova 2002; 2003; Libanova and Pozniak 2002; Malynovska 2004; Pozniak 2007). Since 2008 more researchers have become involved in economic migration research and their focus has moved increasingly to the assessment of the costs and benefits of migration for Ukraine in the context of the migration-development nexus. The gathering of the first all-Ukrainian microlevel data on labour migration by the State Statistics Service in 2008 gave impetus to these studies, as did the significant improvement in the collection of macro data on personal remittances by the National Bank of Ukraine. The Labour Migration Survey, carried out in May–June 2008, employed the nationally representative combined sample of non-institutional households used in the monthly Labour Force Survey and in the quarterly Household Budget Survey, including in total 22,099 households and 48,054 individuals of working age (UCSR 2009; IDSS 2010).1 The next survey on labour migration issues using a nationally representative sample was conducted in 2012 as part of the EU–ILO project “Effective Governance of Labour Migration and its Skill Dimensions” (ILO 2013).