Geographical Labor Mobility

Categories: Econ, Metrics

Are there too many smart, highly-educated people in your city and in your field? Are baristas around town holders of degrees...the higher ed kind?

Then it might be time to relocate to greener pastures...if you can.

Geographic labor mobility is just a fancy way of saying, "the ability for people to move to find a job that matches their skill set." For instance, the EU tries to make geographical labor mobility high, so that a worker from France can cross borders to work in Spain, or someone in Finland can work across the border in Norway with little trouble and expense.

If an economy is in a slump simply because the right people are in the wrong place at the time, seems like an easy fix, right? To raise geographic labor mobility, easy and affordable transportation options need to exist, states and countries need to work together for the legal, bureaucratic side of it, and general standards of living need to be higher (after all, the poorer end of the worker spectrum can’t move if it can’t save up enough money to move in the first place).

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