The Experiences of a New Emigrant Country: Emerging Migration from Hungary

Hungarian migration was not particularly extensive in the past, neither during nor after the last decades of the communist regime. Emigration has remained modest over the two decades of the transition period, albeit with an accelerating increase since 2007. Besides the somewhat meaningless “natural character” of a low propensity to migrate (to challenge the frequently echoing argument, let us refer to the mass emigration of Hungarians at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the 1945–1948 period or following the 1956 revolution) and the lack of language skills (according to (Eurobarometer. (2010). Geographical and labour market mobility (Special Eurobarometer Report 337). http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_337_en.pdf ) evidence, at the end of 2009 Hungarians (and Czechs) reported the highest share in Europe in considering that the difficulty of learning a foreign language might discourage them from working abroad (28 % and 31 %, respectively) p. 114) (as well as a likely lack of willingness to develop), the causes of low mobility were economic and institutional in nature. The level and convergence of GDP to EU15 was among the highest in the region during the 1990s, when it is expected that strong emigration was driven by wage or GDP per person differences (Layard, R., Blanchard, O., Dornbush, R., & Krugman, P. (1992). East–west migration: The alternatives. Cambridge, London: MIT Press.). Accordingly, the convergence of wage differences and low unemployment reflected disincentives of labor emigration (correspondingly to the principle model of Harris & Todero (American Economic Review, 60(1), 126–142, 1970)), which lasted long before gradually vanishing.