Labour Mobility in Europe: An untapped resource? CEPS Policy Brief No. 327, March 2015

Despite public perceptions, labour mobility is low in the EU, particularly within the euro area. The authors of this Policy Brief make four main points: first, that the economic and financial crisis has affected mobility patterns by redirecting flows away from the periphery, thus showing the limits of labour mobility potential within the current eurozone - largely due to the negligible mobility of nationals from large countries hit by the crisis. Second, east-west mobility has not been fundamentally affected by the crisis, and ten years after the eastern enlargement the number of East Europeans living in EU15 should be of no overall concern. Third, the long-term economic effects of mobility are uncertain, but potential negative effects are more likely to show up in sending countries than in receiving ones. Finally, in view of the lessons learned from the economic crisis, the Commission and member states should adopt a longer-term view on labour mobility. The authors recommend a further upgrade of job-matching tools, namely the EURES system, and should foster better recognition of qualifications and the exchange of best practices among mobility networks. In order to improve mobility in the longer term, the Commission and member states should improve the mobility of third-country nationals – starting with those completing tertiary education at an EU institution and able to find employment. The aim of improving mobility gives new impetus to the ‘mother tongue + two foreign languages’ objective and the European Benchmark of Language Competences Initiative, in particular competence in the first foreign language taught at school.

Data compilation of ESOP

The work in this sub-project of ESOP focuses on the advective and convective transforma-tion of water masses in the Greenland Sea and its neighbouring areas. It includes observational work on the sub-mesoscale and analysis of hydrographic data up to the gyre-scale. Observations of active convective plumes were made with a towed chain equipped with up to 80 CTD sensors, giving a horizontal and vertical resolution of the hydrographic fields of a few metres. The observed scales of the penetrative convective plumes compare well with those given by theory. On the mesoscale the structure of homogeneous eddies formed as a result of deep convection was observed and the associated mixing and renewal of the intermediate layers quantified. The relative importance and efficiency of thermal and haline penetrative convection in relation to the surface boundary conditions (heat and salt fluxes and ice cover) and the ambient stratification are studied using the multi year time series of hydro-graphic data in the central Greenland Sea. The modification of the water column of the Greenland Sea gyre through advection from and mixing with water at its rim is assessed on longer time scales. The relative contributions are quantified using modern water mass analysis methods based on inverse techniques. Likewise the convective renewal and the spreading of the Arctic Intermediate Water from its formation area is quantified. The aim is to budget the heat and salt content of the water column, in particular of the low salinity surface layer, and to relate its seasonal and interannual variability to the lateral fluxes and the fluxes at the air-sea-ice interface. This will allow to estimate residence times for the different layers of the Greenland Sea gyre, a quantity important for the description of the Polar Ocean carbon cycle.