Return migration has been increasingly gaining prominence in migration research as well as in migration policies across the world. However, in some regions, such as the Caucasus, the phenomenon of return mi-gration is little explored despite its significance for the region. Based on 64 interviews with returnees and key informants together with additional online surveys with Armenian migrants, this study discusses im-portant issues about return and reintegration with policy implications. It covers voluntary returnees as well as the participants of the assisted voluntary return and reintegration programmes and presents the case for a multiplicity of the return migration motivations and experiences which are dependent on the return pre-paredness and the strategies which the returnees use.
This article is devoted to contemporary return migrations by Kazakhs – a process of great significance for the population and cultural policies of the government of independent Kazakhstan. I examine the repatriation process of the Kazakh population from the point of view of the cultural transformations of Kazakh society itself, unveiling the intended and unintended effects of these return migrations. The case of the Kazakh returns is a historically unique phenomenon, yet it provides data permitting the formulation of broader generalisa-tions. It illustrates the dual impact of culturally different environments, which leads to a simultaneous pre-serving and changing of the culture of the new immigrants. The analyses found in this article are based upon data collected during two periods of fieldwork conducted in June–July 2016 and March 2018 at several locations in Kazakhstan and in cooperation with a Kazakh university. The research methodology is anchored in multi-sited, multi-year fieldwork.
The main aim of this paper is to assess the extent to which the 2016 Brexit referendum impacted on the decisions of young Polish and Lithuanian migrants to stay in the UK or return to the country of origin. We analyse information from 76 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Lithuanians and Poles living in the UK, as well as those who have returned to Lithuania and Poland since June 2016. We find that, for our interviewees, the referendum had little impact on the decision to stay in the UK or return to the country of origin, giving way, instead, to work, family and lifestyle considerations. Only for a select few did it act as a trigger, either adding to other reasons which eventually prompted the return to Lithuania or Poland, or motivating people to secure their rights in the UK and delay plans to leave the country. We conclude by discussing our results together with existing research on transnationalism and life-course migration theory: regardless of interviewees’ decisions to stay or return, these were never final, stressing the fluid nature of migration and the desire of our interviewees to maintain ties across multiple places.
The aim of this paper is to examine individual social remittances in the sphere of employment, against the background of the changing employment patterns and flexibilisation of work. Through an analysis of life stories of post-accession return migrants from the UK to Poland, it investigates the way in which returnees’ work experience gathered abroad impacts on their perception of employment standards in general. The revealed differences are understood as ‘potential social remittances’, i.e. the discrepancies acknowledged by returnees between the realities experienced during emigration and after their return (in this case to Poland). It is argued that the actualisation of the ‘potential social remittances’ depends on return migrants’ coping strategies as well as on the institutional and structural settings in returnees’ home country. The four main distinguished strategies are: re-emigration, activism, adaptation and en-trepreneurship.
In this paper, we use weekly stock market data to examine whether the volatility of stock returns of ten emerging capital markets of the new EU member countries has changed since the opening of their capital markets. In particular we are interested in understanding whether there are high and low periods of stock returns volatility and what the degree of correlation across these markets is. We estimate a Markov-Switching ARCH (SWARCH) model proposed by Hamilton and Susmel (1994) and we allow for the possibility that two or three volatility regimes may exist for stock returns volatility. The main finding of the present study is that the high volatility of stock returns of all new EU emerging stock markets is associated mainly with the 1997‒1998 Asian and Russian financial crises as well as over the 2007‒2009 financial turmoil, while there is a transition to the low volatility regime as they approach the accession to the EU in 2004. It is also shown that the capital flows liberalization process has resulted in an increase in volatility of stock returns in most cases.
The paper deals with application of the Gumbel model to evaluation of the environmental loads. According to recommendations of Eurocodes, the conventional method of determining return period and characteristic values of loads utilizes the theory of extremes and implicitly assumes that the cumulative distribution function of the annual or other basic period extremes is the Gumbel distribution. However, the extreme value theory shows that the distribution of extremes asymptotically approaches the Gumbel distribution when the number of independent observations in each observation period from which the maximum is abstracted increases to infinity. Results of calculations based on simulation show that in practice the rate of convergence is very slow and significantly depends on the type of parent results distribution, values of coefficient of variation, and number of observation periods. In this connection, a straightforward purely empirical method based on fitting a curve to the observed extremes is suggested.
The article considers the issues of the value of invested capital, methods of its measurement and its growth mechanisms. The author draws attention to relationship between the value of capital and the paradigm of economics, which ultimately indicates the existence of connections between the effectiveness of investment and the philosophy of economics. The main purpose of the article is to identify abnormalities in the valuation of assets by investors due to their incorrect or incomplete understanding of the value growth mechanism, the effects of which may assume significance on a macroeconomic scale.
The paper deals with the issue of financial efficiency, measured by the arithmetic rate of return, of indirect financial investments in the area of strategic raw materials (hard coal, copper, crude oil). Two forms of indirect investments were analyzed: shares of natural resources companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange and futures contracts for strategic commodities: hard coal, copper and crude oil.
The time of the analysis is the first 6 months of 2019 and 2020. The year 2019 was regarded as an analysis of the period of economic growth, and the year 2020 was the analysis of the period of economic crisis. The comparisons were made in two dimensions. Firstly, it whether indirect commodity investments show the characteristics of efficiency resilience to the time of the economic crisis was checked (by comparing the achieved rates of return in the two analyzed periods). Secondly, which of the analyzed forms of investment (stocks, contracts) gives better investment results during economic growth and economic crisis was compared.
As it was shown in the paper, indirect commodity investments do not show an above-average rate of return neither during economic growth nor economic crisis. The achieved rates of return on shares compared to changes in the WIG20 index in the analyzed first half of 2019 were negative. Only one company showed a positive and significantly higher than the market rate of return. Very similar results were achieved by the analyzed companies in 2020.
On the other hand, the analysis of prices and rates of return on commodity futures contracts showed that in the period of economic growth it is effective to take a long position on crude oil contracts and a short position on hard coal contracts. In a period of economic crisis, the opposite position is profitable due to the observed growth in hard coal prices and a significant drop in crude oil prices.
The answers to the research questions posed in the paper do not provide indications for recommending indirect forms of investment in commodities as an alternative to analogous forms of other sectors of the economy. The analysis shows that the impact of the economic situation on the efficiency of commodity investment is most noticeable for crude oil, and the least (among the analyzed commodities) for indirect copper-based investments.
This article investigates the post-return experiences of highly skilled Belarusian professionals. I con-centrate on the socio-cultural aspects of highly skilled migration and view returnees as carriers of new experiences, ideas, and practices by studying the ways in which they apply various socio-cultural re-mittances to the different spheres of their lives. In particular, I argue that the formation and transmission of socio-cultural remittances are strongly heterogeneous and selective processes, which manifest them-selves to varying degrees not only in different people, but also in different aspects of people’s lives. The analysis of several socio-cultural remittances in private and public spheres shows that in some cases the socio-cultural remittances display strong gender differences. Moreover, the highly skilled returnees appear to be proactive remitters: some of them re-interpret and transform the socio-cultural remittances before transmitting them. The research draws on the analysis of 43 in-depth interviews with highly skilled professionals who returned to Belarus after long periods of time spent abroad.
Ethnic return migration is a widespread strategy for migrants from economically disadvantaged coun-tries. This article is about those ethnic return migrants who might successfully migrate thanks to their ancestors; their decision is based upon economic, pragmatic or rationalistic incentives aside from their diasporic feeling of belonging. Although this phenomenon has already been studied, scholars still mostly refer only to the benefits proposed by immigration policy as a key to understanding it. The impact of policy in the country of emigration on ethnic return migration is understudied. This article fills this gap. I found that when the Soviet Union introduced an attractive policy for Ukrainians/Russians in terms of study or work opportunities and the inhabitants in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic were quick to proclaim themselves as Ukrainians or Russians, the dissolution of the Soviet Union quickly changed this motiva-tion. Ukrainians with Czech ancestors started to aim at obtaining official status as Czech members of the diaspora because of the benefits proposed by the Czech government (mainly permanent residency). However, it is difficult to prove the required link to one’s Czech ancestors due to Soviet-era documents in which the column with the Czech nationality of people’s ancestors is often missing. These observa-tions lead to the conclusion that an attractive immigration policy aimed at the diaspora should not be treated as the only comprehensive explanation for ethnic return migration. Ethnic policy in the country of emigration also shapes this kind of migration and – in this concrete case – could even discourage ethnic return migrants.
The study considers remittances as part of the lifeworlds of immigrants in multiple interactions with return intentions and communication with those left behind. This is an alternative view of the standard approach to remittances as a possible source of development or as a variable to be explained by family solidarity, investment projects or the reasons for return. The key dependent variable is the home orien-tation of immigrants as a function of remittances, return intentions and communication behaviours, measured in quantitative and typological terms. The typological analysis of home orientation diverges from the standard approach, which is in terms of high or low intensity of cross-border activities of remitting or communicating between immigrants and those they have left behind. It argues for the fact that cross-border activities combine in different ways to generate specific social types of remitting prac-tices. The remitting behaviours of migrants are, in our approach, multidimensional, encompassing eco-nomic, social and cultural content. Three hypotheses are formulated on: 1) collective deprivation in remitting money; 2) survival–development–identification strategies of migrants’ families; and 3) higher predictability of home orientation compared to economic remitting behaviours. In this context, higher predictability means greater variation of the synthetic variable of home orientation by social, cultural and economic factors as compared to the impact of the same factors on the more abstract variable of economic remittances.
This paper describes and tries to explain return intentions of Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian labour migrants in the Netherlands. Previous research has often emphasised the temporary or ‘liquid’ char-acter of Central and Eastern European labour migration. We find that a substantial number of labour migrants intend to stay in the Netherlands for many years, and sometimes forever. Data from a survey of Central and Eastern European (CEE) labour migrants (Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians) in the Neth-erlands (N = 654), is used to test three hypotheses about return intentions. Economic success or fail-ure is not found to be related to the return intentions of migrants. Apparently, some migrants return after being successful in migration, whereas others return after having failed. Migrants with strong links with Dutch society have less strong return intentions, whereas migrants with strong transnation-al ties intend to return sooner.
The aim of the paper is to describe the main patterns and challenges of Ukrainian migration to Greece with reference to the consequences of the recent economic and social crisis in the host country on the migrants’ lives. Specifically, the paper discusses the impact of the legal framework related to migra-tion in four different periods. Historically, Greece was one of the first destinations attracting Ukraini-an migrants, but the migration flows have strongly decreased during the last years and a tendency for return migration has emerged. Among the key features is the fact that the migrant’s experience is deeply influenced and shaped by Greece’s policy response to migration. The paper will therefore spe-cifically examine the impact of the legislative measures on the mobility of the migrants.