Ukraine was left by a record number of labor migrants in 2017
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin said at the end of February that more than a million people left the country last year. "One hundred thousand leave Ukraine every month, and the issue is not only about high salaries there. It is generally about understanding the future and quality of life," Klimkin said. According to the third population survey for 2015-2017, conducted by the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, there are one million three hundred thousand labor migrants in the country. But in fact there are more, since those who have been working abroad for a long time were not included in this sample, experts warn.
As Deutsche Welle notes, a surge in labor migration from Ukraine has been observed since the start of the war in Donbas in 2014, said Oleksiy Poznyak, head of the migration research department at the Institute of Demography and Social Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. According to his estimates, the vast majority of Ukrainians go for short-term work to neighboring Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Russia. "Long-term stays abroad are typical for labor migrants who go to distant countries: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, as well as Western European countries, primarily Germany," the expert noted.
According to published sociological studies, two-thirds of able-bodied Ukrainians are considering the possibility of going abroad for work, another 20 percent are planning specific actions, and 6 percent have already made efforts to do so, said Olga Balakireva, chairwoman of the board of the Ukrainian Institute for Social Research, at a press conference in Kyiv on March 5. According to her, almost a third of Ukrainian enterprises complain about a shortage of labor. "This applies to all industries, including trade and agriculture, not just industry," she noted.
Opportunities to find work in Ukraine in one's specialty with a decent salary are significantly fewer than in Europe, said Ruslan Sobol, head of the Association of Small and Medium Business Owners. "In Poland, for example, people have unskilled work with pay of $700-900 per month. And in the Czech Republic, the salary level is even higher," Sobol noted. He believes that labor migration threatens Ukraine with social collapse.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said on February 27 that the planned increase in the average salary to 10,000 hryvnias (about 300 euros) will help bring labor migrants back from abroad. At the same time, Serhiy Nikolaychuk, director of the monetary policy and economic analysis department of the National Bank of Ukraine, wrote on his Facebook page that an increase in labor migration to Poland is possible in the coming years. "But in the medium term, a certain convergence of wage and productivity levels is expected, which will help calm the situation a bit," Nikolaychuk noted.
Oleksiy Poznyak also confirmed that Poland is becoming a more attractive market for Ukrainian labor migrants than Russia, which was popular until recently. He noted that his Polish colleagues counted 770,000 Ukrainians who came to work. And Polish Minister for Humanitarian Aid and Refugees Beata Kempa estimated the number of Ukrainians in Poland at 2 million people. Polish authorities willingly accept Ukrainians. They use them as an argument in discussions with official Brussels, which urges Poland to accept refugees from war-torn countries in the Middle East and Africa.
Independent economists are not inclined to exaggerate the scale and problems of labor migration from Ukraine. In particular, the Kyiv Center for Economic Strategy believes that external labor migration has been observed in the country since the 1990s. And its increase in recent years is due to the economic and political crisis after the escalation of the conflict with Russia and the introduction of a visa-free regime for Ukrainians by the EU.
Iryna Piontkivska, senior economist at the Center for Economic Strategy, believes that the number of Ukrainians who have experience working abroad may exceed 3 million. But this does not mean that all of them are no longer in the country. The vast majority are "pendulum migrants" who went abroad for a short time and returned home. According to the expert, such migration can have a positive effect on the economy.
Piontkivska recalled that the National Bank of Ukraine reported the receipt of private money transfers from abroad in 2016 of $5.5 billion, which is 5.8 percent of Ukraine's GDP. And for just three quarters of 2017, $5.2 billion, and this amount could be significantly larger, since according to the State Statistics Committee, 70 percent of migrants brought money personally or handed it over through friends or drivers, the economist noted. In turn, Oleksiy Poznyak believes that short-term labor migration can be beneficial for both Ukraine and host countries, if they agree to facilitate the employment of Ukrainians on the condition that they return home after some time.