Cross-Border Labour Mobility and Markets
Issues and Insights from B-solutions
Abstract
European cross-border labour markets have remained weakly integrated. As a result, cross-border labour mobility is still a marginal phenomenon within the European Union. The b-solutions project has worked to improve this situation by suggesting solutions to remove legal and administrative obstacles of cross-border interaction. Here the results of b-solutions are scrutinised against previous literature on the topic. The review shows a number of issues vis-á-vis the state-of-the-art in cross-border labour mobility and markets that b-solutions could consider in the future for improved impact. First, b-solutions could benefit from widening its scope from the strict focus on pull factors and legal and administrative obstacles to include also push factors and other types of barriers of cross-border labour mobility. Second, for ensuring the implementation of the suggested solutions, b-solutions could benefit from probing the wider acceptance necessary for the proposed changes to formal institutions (laws and regulations) at the national and EU levels. Finally, b-solutions could improve its impact by reflecting also the potential negative impacts of removing cross-border obstacles as well as by considering whether the border regions benefit from the solutions or rather act as transit zones for cross-border labour mobility that is directed to larger economic hubs farther away from the border.
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