How Visa Free Regime for Albanians Affect the EU Labor Market?

Abstract

In literature and surveys, the issue of economic impacts and consequences of immigration from non-EU countries like Albania to the EU labor market have been much debated especially in the EU side. According to the theories of migration, a major incentive to migrate is a real income or wage differentials between regions or countries. Also, the economic impact of immigration on wages and employment levels will obviously differ with the skill levels of migrants. If migrants mainly are unskilled and native workers skilled, like in the case of emigration from Albania to the EU especially to the neighbors and main receiving countries of Greece and Italy, we can easily say that Albanian and the EU workers are complements because of Albanian immigrants and the EU native workers are not substitutes in production. So, an increase in the number of Albanian immigrants raises the marginal product of the EU natives, shifting up the demand curve for the EU native-born workers. This increase in the EU native productivity raises the EU native wages. Moreover, some EU natives now see the higher wage rate as an additional incentive to enter the labor market, and the EU native employment also rises. On the other side, the empirical literature on this issue does not agree on the size of the potential immigrants from Albania to the EU labor market. Although, it is not clear what the sources were or the methods used to arrive at these estimates, there is reason to believe that the figures for the main countries such as Greece and Italy are very probable. According to the historical background size of the Albanian migrants to the especially Greece and Italy the size of migration after accession is estimated between 600 thousands and 1.1 million. As a result, considering this number of potential migrants, we can easily say that the public fears concerning the occupation of the European labor markets especially in Greece and Italy by the Albanian immigrants seems to be exaggerated. We can clearly state that estimations show the potential number or size of migration after possible accession of Albania to the EU. Unfortunately, these estimations do not show the impact of this potential size of migrants on the EU labor market like especially the effects of immigration on wages and employment opportunities. Up to now in literature we do not have any empirical study or result which gives the impact of this size of potential migration on wages or employment opportunities of native workers in the EU labor market.