International migration of Romanians. A gravity model analysis.

Abstract

Migration at international level is an important aspect to be known for every country in the world, either it is a generator of migrants or a receiver. For this reason, we chose to analyse the international migration for Romania. Romania is a country with high levels of emigration since the communism regime has fallen and, also, after becoming a member of European Union when labour mobility became free.  The period of analysis is 2000-2020. In this period of time in the top preferences of destinations for Romanians were Germany, Italy, Spain, and United Kingdom. For the empirical part it was used Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimator with fixed effects (PPML with fixed effects) on a gravity model. Results show that Romanians migration is driven by pull effects, rather than push effects. So, people are leaving for better conditions: more available jobs and higher wages in the destination country. In addition, the results are robust when we introduce a dummy variable, for the crisis in the years 2008 and 2020.