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Since the early 1990s, international migration and its economic, political and social impact remains a fundamental issue in Albania. Albania is among the top countries in the world for the scale and intensity of international migration. Meanwhile, asylum seeking is a relatively new phenomenon for the country. Between 2010 and September 2019, around...
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... percent) after that of 1992 (48.3 percent). As could be expected, nearly 67,000 Albanian nationals applied for economic asylum, in 2015 (Gedeshi, 2020). As such, Albania ranked fourth among the top countries regarding the number of asylum seekers in the EU, mainly in Germany (OECD, 2019). ...
High-skilled workforce migration has become a dominant pattern of international migration and a contemporary challenge for many developing economies. Considering that outward mobility of skilled workers' effects on migrant-sending countries is still unexplored in the literature, studies on economic implications from an origin country perspective are limited. Therefore, this research paper aims to explore the leading causes of high-skilled migration in Albania and its potential economic implications for the country's development in the long run. Our study is based on a qualitative research method and provides a comprehensive country-level analysis of education and labor market conditions, the role of skills/occupational mismatch, and youth unemployment trends, which altogether add to the outmigration of the young workforce. In the first part, the study results suggest that labor underutilization (caused by existing occupational and skills mismatch) and low wages are the main driving forces of high-skilled migration. Based on the migration-development theoretical models used in this paper and the poor economic performance of Albania observed for the last three decades, our findings suggest that the skilled labor shortages due to huge emigration flows represent a significant loss to the Albanian labor market and can negatively affect the socioeconomic development and productivity level of the country.
