The Devil Is in the Detail: Measuring Intra-EU Labour Migration 39 specific research questions that were previously unanswerable (e.g. Fitzgerald et al., 2014; de Haas et al., 2015; Beine et al., 2015). However, one area of EU migration data that is still missing is on ‘category of movement’ – for example, whether a person is moving for work, study, or family reasons. In order to contribute to this gap in migration data, we have created specific indicators for intra-EU labour migration using the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). This data is essential for contributing to the evaluation and development of EU and national labour migration policy. In this paper we aim to first highlight key trends in intra-EU labour migration and explore what existing migration data has to offer researchers looking to study migration related research questions. Second, we detail the labour migration indicators that we have created and the method we used to produce them. Finally, we provide those indicators for other researchers to make use of if they wish. This paper thus proceeds as follows; the next section explores the key trends in EU labour migration and highlights what existing researchers have done. Section 3 notes some of the most extensive and useful migration databases and highlights a few of the newer innovations in migration data. Section 4 then discusses the limitations of currently available data and why there was a need to create new indicators for intraEU labour migration. Section 5 explains my approach and method for generating the EU labour migration indicators and section 6 provides descriptive statistics for those indicators. Finally, section 7 concludes the paper. 3.2 Exploring intra-EU labour migration Within the last two decades, 13 Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries have joined the EU over three successive rounds of enlargement encompassing around 100 million new citizens. In principle, EU accession grants these citizens the right of free movement and all its associated benefits. In practice, the application of this right has not been so clear cut. The 2003 Treaty of Accession made a provision to enable current member states to restrict the labour market access of new member state citizens for up to seven years (known as the 2-3-2 rule). At one point or another, all of the pre-2004 member states have chosen to introduce transitional labour market restrictions for a number of the post-2004 member states on the grounds of limiting disruption to native citizens’ employment and labour market opportunities (Dustmann, Frattini, & Halls, 2010). Today, there are approximately 17 million EU citizens living in an EU member state with the citizenship of another EU Member State and approximately 20.4 million EU citizens are residing in an EU Member State different to the one they were born in (Eurostat, 2017c). Germany receives the largest number of EU citizens, followed by the United Kingdom (UK) and Spain. However, in relative terms, Luxembourg and Switzerland have
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