GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

This topic should shed light on the need to expand workforce by recruiting foreign labour, also by assessing viability and trade-offs of other alternatives. These could be, but are not limited to: raising wages, also considering incentives needed employers to do so vis-à-vis foreign worker recruitment; education and upskilling of local workforce, considering the possibility of matching supply and demand of labour depending on the sector and timeframe of the needs; automation, with a focus to investments and incentives needed to reach a level of automation of work in sectors which rely on migrant workforce. As such, proposals should assess causes and consequences of shortages in destination countries warranting the establishment of partnerships with third countries to recruit needed skills.

Proposals should develop a way to evaluate labour markets and analyse matching needs and shortages compared to the EU. Proposals could combine labour market analyses with a focus on the education system and analyse structures in place for training people for those sectors in need, including spending attention on qualifications obtained in view of EU recognition, as well as on language skills as a factor for migrant integration. Proposals should also analyse the relation between investing in upskilling local workforce in view of recruiting a proportion of this, together with the creation of local human capital that could act as a driver for local development. Overall, such analyses should shed light on conditions which influence positively or negatively local development processes vis-à-vis foreign upskilling and recruitment, analysing conditions which lead domestic institutions to capitalise on the positive effects. 

As such, proposals should consider both sides of ‘skill partnerships’ including the issues of brain drain and economic development of third countries, and assess the shortage model on which they are premised both in destination and origin countries, looking at the distribution of benefits for destination countries, origin countries and migrants themselves.