FRIEDRICH-EBERT-STIFTUNG 86 By 2010, due to the severe economic crisis, Spain ceased to be a net immigration country and started to become a net emigration one. In 2013, 532,303 residents of Spain emigrated(compared with 288,432 emigrants in 2008, which represents an increase of+84 per cent), while 280,768 people immigrated to Spain in the same year(compared with 599,074 people who immigrated to Spain in 2008, a decrease of –53 per cent)(Moreno–Torres Sánchez 2015: 11). The subtraction of emigration and immigration flows within a year provides the net migration rate. If the net migration rate is positive, this implies that the number of immigrants outperforms the number of emigrants, which in turn means an increase in the total population of a country. By contrast, a negative net migration rate means that the number of emi­grants is higher than the number of immigrants within a year, that is, that the country has experienced a loss in the total number of its residents because of migration. Comparing this net migration rate of the years before and after the economic crisis clearly highlights the changing migration status of Spain: in 2008, the net migration rate was+310,642(which represents 6.7 net entries per 1,000 Spanish inhabitants), while in 2013 the net migration rate was –251,535(that is, 5.3 persons per 1,000 inhabitants left Spain in 2013) (Moreno–Torres Sánchez 2015: 11–12). The recent rapid in­crease of emigration flow in Spain gives some insight into the importance of economic factors in emigration decisions(for example, economic and labour market downturns). According to Moreno-Torres Sánchez(2015) and despite these high negative net migration rates, Spain is nevertheless currently not suffering from a brain drain of its citizens. Indeed, the large emigration flows since the beginning of the economic crisis are due mainly to departures of non-national EU and non-EU immigrants: out of the 532,303 citizens who left Spain in 2013, 55.4 per cent were non-EU citizens, 30.8 per cent were non-national EU citizens and only 13.8 per cent of them were Spaniards(which corre­sponds to 73,329 Spaniards who emigrated in 2013). The large emigration flow of non-Spanish citizens resulted in a decrease in the immigration stock: between 2010 and 2014 the stock of immigrants in Spain decreased by –728,000 (–295,036 non-national EU citizens and –429,211 non-EU citizens)(Moreno-Torres Sánchez 2015). Lastly, and based on the Labour Force Survey data, Moreno-Torres Sánchez (2015: 15) estimates that 55.3 per cent of the Spaniards who emigrated between 2008 and 2012 hold a tertiary degree. Thus, according to her study, while the number of Spaniards who emigrated in recent years remains relatively low, Spanish emigration is characterised by a high proportion of highly qualified citizens. In contrast to the relatively recent increase in emigration flows from southern European countries, the central and eastern European new member states started to experience substantial emigration rates to older EU member states as soon as they joined the EU. Furthermore, the proportion of emigrants from CEE countries with a tertiary degree is higher than the overall proportion of CEE citizens holding a tertiary degree. The Hungarian case, reported on by Pogátsa(2015), illustrates this trend well: about 5.3 per cent of the overall population of Hungary resided in another EU member state in 2013. In addition, Hungarians who live in another EU member state tend to be younger and more highly educated than the Hungarian population on average(Pogátsa 2015). Such a situation can be an indication of an intra-EU brain drain affecting CEE countries. However, the Polish case shows convincingly that a closer inspection of the national context in which these emigration waves take place requires a more nuanced evaluation of the country situation. Emigration flows in Poland radically increased during the post-accession years: in 2002 about 800,000 Poles resided abroad, which represents 1.8 per cent of the total Polish population(the main destination countries being Germany, the United States and southern European countries). By contrast, the stock of Polish citizens residing abroad reached 2.3 million persons in the peak year of 2007(6.6 per cent of the total Polish population) and remains relatively high despite the recent economic crisis that hit several EU countries. Among the CEE countries, only Romania faced an increase in emigration flows on a similar scale to Poland(Kaczmarczyk 2015: 5). Post-accession emigration in Poland is characterised by selectivity – emigrants tend to be more highly educated than the total population – and an overrepresentation of younger citizens: the 2011 census data indicate that 31.4 per cent of the emigrants residing abroad for more than three months are between 20 and 29 years old(compared with 18.6 per cent of 20–29 years old within the overall Polish population) and that 22.8 per cent of the emigrants hold a tertiary degree (compared with 19 per cent of the total Polish population who have a tertiary degree)(CSO 2013, cited in Kaczmarczyk 2015: 6). Similar to most other CEE countries, a significant overrepresentation of highly qualified citizens among Polish emigrants could indicate a brain drain in accordance with the theoretical framework presented in the first part of this study. Furthermore, the severe wage gap between Poland and the destination countries is one of the essential traditional migra­tion push factors. However, the detailed study by Kaczmarczyk(2015) shows convincingly that diagnosing the presence of brain drain in a country should not be reduced to detecting an overrepresentation of highly educated among emigrants. Instead, Kaczmarczyk(2015) points to several internal and external factors that blur the categorisation of Poland as a brain drain country. First, the external factors refer to the labour market integration of highly qualified Polish immi­grants: even if the emigrant population tends to be highly educated, a large share of Polish immigrants have low-skilled jobs abroad. According to a recent study by Kaczmarczyk, the rate of return to education among highly educated Poles working in the United Kingdom was the lowest in the British labour market, even lower than the return to education in the Polish labour market(Kaczmarczyk and Tyrowicz 2015, cited in Kaczmarczyk 2015). According to Kaczmarczyk(2015: 14), this situation challenges the existence of a significant positive»brain effect« in the case of Polish immigrants in the United Kingdom. The high prevalence of overeducation among Polish immigrants working in other EU member states indicates the presence of»brain waste« affecting highly qualified Polish immigrants. Brain waste refers to a situation in which highly qualified immigrants fail to find jobs matching their qualifications and continue to work in jobs for which they are overeducated, even after a period of adaptation and