In November 2022 the MPF is launching its latest service offering in the area of legal and labour migration, the Labour Mobility Partner Country Dashboard. Check out the tool on the MPF website here!
What is the dashboard?
The Labour Mobility Dashboard is an online tool that gathers and visualises key labour and migration data of EU priority partner countries. It covers the most relevant elements pertinent to labour migration initiatives, including employment, labour stock, migration, education, economy and demography.
The tool aims to improve the ease of finding and using reliable and credible data for labour migration purposes. By offering comparable data across countries, the tool seeks to inform policymakers in designing and setting up labour mobility schemes, cross-border vocational training initiatives or skills partnerships.
For example, a low level of tertiary education in a partner country, as shown in the Education dashboard, may hint at the potential for investment in vocational education and training or the need to align job opportunities to existing profiles within the country of origin. The number of graduates by tertiary education sector may help direct stakeholders towards a sector with particular potential for mobility. In other words, the tool provides insights into where the largest scope for mobility or further capacity development may lie, and it can serve as a starting point for matching and developing further cooperation between countries and sectors.
Who is it for?
The tool is intended for a wide audience of professionals, such as policymakers (at national or EU levels), private or public recruiters, or other types of labour and skills migration practitioners and researchers. The compiled data can be useful during preliminary research and in the design phase of a new initiative and can serve as a starting point for further research to provide leads towards where more detailed information may have to be collected to make cooperation possible.
Where do the data come from?
Data presented in the tool come from verifiable and reliable sources such as the World Bank, OECD, ILO, and Eurostat. The tool allows users to access, analyse and compare the most recent available trends since it is designed to be automatically updated in line with the source data. Users can export and print data to further process and share information in the most suitable way.
Partner Country Factsheets
Complementary to the tool containing data from specific fields and sectors, Partner Country Factsheets provide an overview of a country’s institutional context on labour migration. Each Factsheet explains the wider governance structure, economic priorities, key institutions and contact points in partner countries (it is currently available only for Tunisia but will be rolled out to the other countries in due course).
The present country selection was based on the priority partner countries as announced by the European Commission in its Communication on Attracting Skills and Talent but could be expanded and/or adapted as needs arise.
Data Gaps
Available, reliable, and comparable data on labour markets, education and skills levels are still quite limited and disparate across partner countries. Vocational Education and Training (VET), more complex family reunification data (e.g. disaggregated by country of origin) or FDI data, for example, was not readily available or usable for the intended purpose in many partner countries.
The tool, therefore, also bears the significant potential to point us towards where further primary research is still needed or where structural issues (e.g. lack of institutional set-up) do not provide sufficient insight into a particular subset of information. Where relevant data was available but not comparable, the tool offers further information in the “Additional Data” tab.
Main Takeaways
In summary, the tool provides an overview of seven countries’ migration and economic profiles. It allows users to compare data relevant to labour migration and skills mobility initiatives across this selection of countries. The tool also reveals certain gaps in information, which represent interesting potential areas for further research and cooperation with the priority countries. It seeks to provide a point of initial orientation and an evidence base for decision-making that can inform the design of new improvements of existing labour and skills mobility initiatives.
See also:
Re-thinking Approaches to Labour Migration, a complementary publication to this dashboard. While the dashboards focus on key data of potential partner countries, this series of publications map out existing pathways towards select EU member states (Poland, Estonia, Portugal and the Netherlands). It consists of one Policy Brief, four full case studies (Poland, Estonia, Portugal, the Netherlands) and four abridged case studies (Poland, Estonia, Portugal, the Netherlands).