The Impact of Social Systems and their Coordination on Economic Migration

The existing empirical studies examined the impact of different variables, such as common language, economic, cultural and geographical factors, on migration. However, none of the studies deals with the social security systems including their coordination as a relevant explanatory factor. The paper focuses on the social security systems in Europe, their mutual coordination and their influence on international migration. The influence of social systems on economic migration can be twofold: infl uencing the labour migration, i.e. migrants who move for work, and also influencing the benefit migration, i.e. migrants who move in order to receive social benefits. We present the advanced migration model extended by the factors of social security coordination. The main finding is that the labour migration prevails significantly over the benefit migration. Role of social systems as social magnets was not proved to be statistically significant.