This paper investigates the effects of labour migration and openness to trade on regional skill endowments across the European Union at a time of increased economic integration. Using regional data from Eurostat's Regio database and the open web source Openflight for the period 1998-2010 we test whether the spatial concentration of skills has increased or decreased over time. We account for neighboring effects associated with both geographic proximity and links through civilian flights using a random spatial effect model. We find that migration contributes to convergence in regional skill endowments across member states, particularly at the Southern and Eastern periphery of the European Union. We also find that inter-regional connectivity through civilian flights has much stronger effects on the evolution of a region's skill endowment than geographic contiguity.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.