Impact of International Migration Flows on the European Union and Ukraine

The paper presents the results of the research of the international migration process in the EU Member States that are destination countries for migrants from many countries including Ukrainians. The study discuses different approaches and methods analyzing migration process and comes to the point that econometric modeling based on panel data analysis is one of the most appropriate and useful tools in case of studying a group of countries, in this paper – the EU Member states. The article investigates economic and social factors that influence inward migration to the destination countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, Estonia, Italy, Spain, Germany, and Poland, which are deeply involved into migration process with the other European countries and non-EU countries, including Ukraine. It is revealed that immigration flows are highly dependent on GDP per capita and income level in the host countries. The results of the analysis have also shown that the role of migration flows in the socio-economic development of the EU and Ukraine is constantly increasing. This is due to both the quantitative increase in the number of recent immigrants in the EU countries and their percentage of total population, as well as to the growing influence of migrant activities on the socio-economic development of countries. At the same time, migrant remittances have a significant impact on economies of home countries. For instance, for Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Moldova, Montenegro and Ukraine the migrant remittances inflows in 2019 exceeded 10% of national GDP.