Comment on Holger Wolf

Abstract

The free movement of labor and other persons has been defined as one of the four fundamental freedoms of the Single Market in the European Union (EU) since the Treaty of Rome. It was introduced for the six founding members of the then European Economic Community (EEC) with a joint population of some 180 million in 1968, and has been applied to the members of the European Economic Area (EEA) since the beginning of the 1990s, which includes all EU members and three other countries with a joint population of some 380 million. Moreover, in the course of the present enlargement round, the free movement will be extended to the accession countries from Central and Eastern Europe when the transitional periods have expired. Nevertheless, although the barriers to the mobility of labor and other persons are largely removed, migration within the EU is rather low: no more than 1.5 percent of the population of the EU-15 reside in other EU member states. Although differences in income levels between the member states of the “old” EU and EEA are, at least from a global perspective, rather low, this figure is nevertheless small. Since institutional barriers to migration have largely been abolished, the low migration within the EEA seems to reflect a number of social, cultural, and historical factors which hinder the mobility of labor and other persons in Europe.