Return migrants in Albania: The determinants of “entrepreneurial gain”

Return migrants bring the prospects of an entrepreneurship gain to their country of origin. In this paper the key determinants of returnees becoming entrepreneurs in Albania are investigated. The survey data utilized enables returnees’ characteristics before their migration, during their stay abroad, and after returning to be assessed as facilitators of entrepreneurship. There is evidence of significant entrepreneurial gain among Albanian returnees. The incidence of self‐employment after return was 2–3 times higher than it had been before migration and was nearly 15 times higher than the percentage of self‐employed in the Albanian labor force as a whole. However, the analysis suggests that self‐employment is a poor proxy for entrepreneurship among returnees. There is a need to distinguish between the planned/opportunity self‐employed (the entrepreneurs) and the unintended/necessity self‐employed, the latter largely becoming self‐employed as a means of addressing economic hardship. We find that women, those trained during migration and returnees who remitted more per year, were more likely to become entrepreneurs after returning, whereas men, those in self‐employment before leaving, those spending more time abroad, those who were forced to return, migrants who returned back to their place of birth and residence, and those who returned from Greece, were more likely to be self‐employed.