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Social capital and willingness to migrate in post-communist countries

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Abstract

We analyse the correlation of various measures of social capital with the willingness to migrate in 28 post-communist and five western European comparison countries using the Life in Transition Survey. Memberships in clubs and civil society organisations are substantially lower in post-communist countries that in the Western European countries this is mainly due to the cohorts socialised prior to political reforms in the 1990’s. Differences in endowments with this measure of social capital explain around 2.5 percentage points of the 9–11 percentage point difference in the willingness to migrate between the post-communist and comparison countries. Differences in contacts to friends and family, by contrast, contribute only little to explaining these differences. Furthermore, despite clear cohort effects in endowments with social capital between cohorts socialized during and after communist rule, there is no clear evidence of such cohort effects in the impact of social capital on the willingness to migrate.

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Fig. 1

Source: LiTS, own calculations

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Notes

  1. To the best of our knowledge next to Bönisch and Schneider (2010, 2013), who focus on East and West Germany, only Zhao and Yao (2017), on China, and Cattaneo (2016), on Albania, have so far analyzed the impact of such social capital on the willingness to migrate in such countries.

  2. Such measures have been used extensively in the migration literature (see Van Dalen and Henkens 2008 for a survey and Bönisch and Schneider 2013 for an application to the impact of social capital). This is justified by the few observations on actual migration provided in most data sets (in the low mobility context of post-communist countries – see Huber and Nowotny 2016) and by such data having been shown to capture the determinants of actual migration behavior rather precisely (see Van Dalen and Henkens 2008).

  3. This has previously been used by Broulíková et al. (2018), Cojocaru (2014) and Nikolova and Sanfey (2016). We focus its’ second wave because the first and third waves (from 2006 to 2016) contain no or incomparable questions on the dependent and most of the independent variables used in the current analysis.

  4. The wording of the questions on and coding of the key dependent and independent variables is explained in more detail in the data “Annex” to this paper.

  5. The LITS also contains a question on whether respondents plan to move abroad or (if not wanting to move abroad) within the country in the next year. This question, however, does not allow for a separate analysis of the willingness to move abroad and within the country because only those unwilling to migrate abroad are asked about their willingness’ to migrate internally. It also does not allow a separate analysis for different cohorts on the account of the few affirmative responses to this question. In robustness checks (available from the authors) we, however, also ran the baseline specification for this alternative dependent variable. These results are less robust than those in the current analysis and are also often statistically insignificant. Results for the memberships in clubs and civil society organisations are robust, however.

  6. In robustness checks we also included these as dichotomous rather than continuous variables. The results are driven by the extreme values of these variables. People that meet their friends on most days are significantly more likely to be willing to migrate, as are people who rarely or never meet their family. The results for other variables are not affected by this change in specification, though.

  7. This was encoded by 10 categorical variables (in 5-year age groups from 16 to 64 years) to account for potential non-linearities.

  8. Further robustness checks (available from the authors) included running regressions where country fixed effects were replaced by region fixed effects (to account for the regional context), excluding the years of residence from the specification and adding indicator variables for urban and rural regions. None of these changes altered the qualitative results for the aggregate willingness to migrate.

  9. These are the CEE-EU countries and the Balkan countries (Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Kosovo, Serbia, and Slovenia) and the FSU countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan). We exclude Turkey from the analysis as it is somewhat of a special case given that the other comparison countries are EU members.

  10. We exclude persons in late childhood and early adulthood (i.e. aged between 6 and 19 years) in 1990 to avoid including age groups that have been shown to have rather unstable attitudes in previous literature (see e.g. Alwin and Krosnick, 1991). In our robustness checks (available from the authors) we, however, also provide regression results for those aged older than 26 and younger than 40.

  11. Results with respect to membership in clubs and civil society organisation are also robust to instrumentation with the respective regional shares of social capital (see Table 6 in the appendix). Otherwise in IV-results the frequency of meeting friends as well as the frequency of meeting the family is an insignificant determinant of all measures of the willingness to migrate in CEE-EU and the comparison countries. In all post-communist countries, however, the frequency of meeting friends statistically significantly reduces the willingness to migrate, and the frequency of meeting the family increases it.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Austrian Institute of Economic Research, Vienna, Austria

    Peter Huber

  2. Masaryk University, Lipová 41a, 60200, Brno, Czech Republic

    Stepan Mikula

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  1. Peter Huber
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  2. Stepan Mikula
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Correspondence to Peter Huber.

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Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 43 kb)

Annex 1: Coding of dependent and key independent variable

Annex 1: Coding of dependent and key independent variable

This annex describes the coding of the main dependent and independent variables.

  • Willingness to migrate—the dependent variables are constructed from two questions that read: “Would you be willing to move elsewhere in our country for employment reasons?” and “Would you be willing to move abroad for employment reasons?” Respondents could reply “yes” or “no”. Respondents answering at least one question affirmatively are willing to migrate. Those that answered the first question positively are willing to migrate within the country and those that responded positively to the second question are encoded as being willing to migrate abroad.

  • Meet friends and meet family—these measures are based on two questions asking, “How often do you meet up with family members not living in your household?” and “How often do you meet up with friends?” with responses being 1 = On most days, 2 = Once or twice a week, 3 = Once or twice a month, 4 = Less than once or twice a month, 5 = Never.

  • Memberships in clubs and civil society organizations—is based on a question that reads as “Here is a list of clubs and civil society organizations. For each one, please indicate, whether you are an active member, an inactive member, or not a member of that type of organization”. The list of organizations was (a) churches and religious organizations, (b) sport and recreational organizations and associations, (c) art, music and educational organizations, (d) labour unions, (e) environmental organizations, (f) professional associations, (g) humanitarian and charitable organizations, (h) youth organization and (i) parties. The variable was formed by taking the count of organizations of which the respondent was at least an inactive member.

  • Years of residence—is based on the question “How long have you lived in this city/town/village?”. Respondents could either provide the number of years or state that they had lived in the city/town/village for their whole life. For persons, who responded that they had lived in the city/town/village for their whole, life their age was entered as the years of residence.

    Table 6 Instrumental Variable Regression results
    Full size table

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Huber, P., Mikula, S. Social capital and willingness to migrate in post-communist countries. Empirica 46, 31–59 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10663-018-9417-7

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