Hungarians working abroad, non-residents working in Hungary (Difficulties in the statistical enumeration)

Abstract

Although the understanding of international migration is important for both the countries of origin and countries of destination, the tools of statistics are quite insufficient. The EU LFS (EU Labour Force Survey), which may be considered as mirror statistics and a target survey as well, is an important data source, nevertheless, methodological pitfalls may occur. Until the recent years, Hungary was hardly affected by the migration process of the EU, so its recording was less important. As a result of the 2008 crisis, however, the number of people working abroad has increased, and the growth was further intensified by lifting the restrictions in the Austrian and German labour market in the spring of 2011. For Hungary, the three main EU countries of destination are Austria, Germany and the United Kingdom. Labour movements to these countries include commuting, which can be traced by the Hungarian LFS. Migration processes have typical characteristics by the countries of destination, while the data sources available for estimating the size of migration and the relevance of their information are different also by countries. For recording the labour migration to Hungary, there are several administrative data sources, so it is not necessary to use the less reliable data of population surveys.