Brain Drain – Brain Gain: European Labour Markets in Times of Crisis 5 1 INTRODUCTION Céline Teney, University of Bremen The normative discourse on European integration tends to praise intra-EU labour mobility and frame it as desirable. Intra-EU labour mobility has indeed been considered an essential component in the vision of an integrated European Union. Accordingly, spatial mobility of workers represents a means of optimising economic stability within the monetary union: labour mobility is the employment solution for poten­tial growth imbalances in an integrating economic system (Recchi 2008: 213). As a result, policies intended to facilitate worker mobility have constituted a core component of the EU policy agenda for decades: European citizenship, free movement rights and institutionalised educational mobility (for example, through the Bologna process) undoubtedly illustrate the priority attributed by the EU to intra-EU labour mobility. Besides this general conception of labour mobility, the intra-EU mobility of highly qualified workers is envisioned as likely to stimulate innovation and to boost the knowledge economy within the EU. While the normative discourse on the importance for EU integration of intra-EU highly qualified labour mobility tends to be consensual, little is known empirically about the extent of this phenomenon and its economic, social and political consequences. The fact that intra-EU labour mobility has remained of limited magnitude until recently to some extent explains the marginalisation of this issue in the empirical aca­demic debate. However, intra-EU mobility has boomed in re­cent years mainly as a consequence of(i) central and eastern European citizens’ access to the EU labour market(Galgóczi, Leschke and Watt 2012) and(ii) the recent economic crisis and the resulting high unemployment in several European countries(OECD 2013). Intra-EU immigration flow has indeed become as large as the flow of non-EU immigrants to the EU: 1.7 million EU citizens emigrated to another EU member state and 1.7 million third-country citizens immigrated to the EU in 2012(Eurostat 2014). Intra-EU labour mobility is thus becoming increasingly significant within the EU. Moreover, this intra-EU labour mobility is likely to be characterised by an overrepresentation of highly qualified Europeans who tend to possess the kind of human capital – including foreign language proficiency – and information on the destination country needed to facilitate migration. This mobility on the part of highly qualified workers and its potential economic, social and political consequences for the EU and its member states have therefore become crucial empirical issues. This, in turn, would help to refine the normative discourse by pro­viding empirical insights into intra-EU highly qualified labour mobility and its impact across a range of different EU member states. The main question discussed in this study is the extent to which this intra-EU highly qualified labour mobility reflects an emerging brain drain and gain within the EU. This question is investigated in more detail in a selection of country studies covering three regions facing contrasting experiences with intra-EU highly qualified labour mobility:(i) western Europe, which is the region with the largest intra-EU immigration flows;(ii) central and eastern Europe(hereafter CEE), which has been facing large intra-EU emigration flows since the implementation of free movement rights; and(iii) southern European countries that have been characterised by a sudden increase of intra-EU emigration flows as a result of the recent economic crisis. In the next section, I will briefly describe the concepts of brain drain and brain gain and their implications in the EU context and subsequently provide an overview of intra-EU immigration flows and stocks among the 28 EU member states(EU28). 1.1 CONCEPTS AND METHODS 1.1.1 DEFINITION OF INTRA-EU BRAIN DRAIN AND BRAIN GAIN The term»brain drain« refers to the international transfer of»human capital resources«, mainly in the sense of the migration of highly educated individuals from less to more prosperous countries(Beine, Docquier and Rapoport 2008: 631). Within the EU context, brain drain implies that the intra-EU immigration of highly qualified workers tends to be permanent and unidirectional and results in a growing skilled labour shortage in the sending countries. This is likely to lead to new asymmetries and inequalities between sending and destination EU countries: brain drain renders»human capital scarcer where it is already scarce and more abundant where it is already abundant«(Docquier and Rapoport 2012: 725).