56 Chapter 3 mean there is no need for individuals to apply for a work permit and there is a lack of incentives to register and deregister in the places mobile citizens move between. Thus, despite the high economic importance of intra-EU labour migration, high quality and detailed data on stocks and flows of this movement is lacking, hindering research on this particular subject. This paper has set out to highlight key trends in intra-EU labour migration and provide a detailed overview of the currently available data on intra-EU labour migration. Moreover, it has sought to explain how I have attempted to fill one particular gap in the statistics with the creation of two novel indicators for use in research. In particular, I created specific indicators for intra-EU labour migration for 16 European countries, from 2004 up until 2016, using the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS). The EULFS is a valuable resource for analysing the movement of labour as it uses comparative methodology across all countries, it is regularly conducted, and it provides information on employment, nationality, and broad country of birth in a large sample size. The EU-LFS enables the analysis of intraEU labour migration as it identifies both country of birth and labour force status for individuals. There are three main limitations in the usuage of the EU-LFS to construct indicators for intra-EU labour migration. First, short-term migration such as seasonal migration is hard to capture in the survey because these groups stay for a limited amount of time in their host country (Galgóczi et al., 2009) and the data is only collected on an annual basis. Second, there is the possibility that intra-EU labour migrants are underrepresented due to the likelihood of non-response. Third, in creating the indicators, there could be a possible bias arising from dropping missing values if those that are dropped are from groups that share similar characteristics. In our comparisons with what data is publicly available, however, they are mostly closely correlated and follow the same trends. By untangling intra-EU labour migrants from pre-2004 member states and post-2004 member states, this article shows that there are currently different trends between the two groups. This data is essential for contributing to the evaluation and development of EU and national labour migration policy. Future research should look to improve our current understanding of intra-EU labour migration and continue delivering new ways of filling the ever-decreasing gaps in migration data. Especially as debates and policy on intra-EU movements could benefit from having a clearer evidence-base in this topic. The full set of indicators on intra-EU labour mobility can be found in the appendix for other researchers to make use of if they wish.
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