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also practicing abroad, mainly in the UK, USA, Germany and Austria. Swedish doctors
are practicing in Norway, and the US.
I.3.3 Quantifying the impact of the EU enlargement
In Europe, the accession of more countries to the European Union in 2004 and 2007
increased the scope for mobility among health workers and raised additional issues within
the European context. In particular, ten new Member states were added in 2004, and two
in 2007. Some countries, particularly those located in the eastern part of the region, are
concerned about the outflows of health workers as a result from accession or that might
also increase as they are part of a larger market for mobility of health professionals. In
fact, this enlargement extended the European labor market for health professionals. The
portability of health professional qualifications was guaranteed by the European treaties,
establishing a free movement area. This facilitated the recognition of diplomas for
medical doctors, nurses, dentists and other health workers. Enlargement also provided
new incentives to work elsewhere due to lower salary levels in the accession countries.
The economics literature attempts to predict future migration flows from the accession
EU countries based on econometric models using as input past immigration flows from
countries other than ECE countries (for example, Boeri and Brücker, 2000; Fertig, 2001;
Bauer and Zimmermann, 1999 ). The theoretical bases for the empirical specification are
the economic arguments that relate migration to differences in returns to human capital
and costs of migration (for instance, Harris and Todaro, 1970). Boeri and Brücker (2000)
use their model to predict migration flows from the CEECs 70 , Bulgaria, Romania, to
Germany. They take the distribution of immigrants from the CEEC-10 to the European
Union in 1998 and use it to extrapolate their predictions. They assume that the relative
number of migrants going to each European country is going to remain to the same level
as in 1998 and they forecast future migration flows to the whole EU-15 from the CEEC-
10. Fertig (2001) only predicts the number of potential migrants from the CEEC-10 to
Germany. Bauer and Zimmermann (1999) predict the percentage of the population in
certain CEECs which will migrate to the EU.
70 The CEECs countries are Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and
Slovenia. CEECs-10 is the CEECs plus Bulgaria and Romania.
! '%!