Utilisarion of returining migrants' skills and labour: the case of Lithuania

ENDuring the last two decades Lithuania has experienced one of the highest labour emigration rates in the EU. However, during the last few years this trend has changed, and a significant number of mobile workers returned. In this chapter we analyse the situation of the returning migrants in the labour market of Lithuania and the effect of return migration on labour productivity and utilisation. We use two different methods: quantitative analysis of data from the Labour Force Survey and machine-based text mining of the news articles on return migration in the main news portals. The two methods cross disciplines and are rarely used together, however we draw on them in order to address the limitations of the currently available data sets. While individual stories of return are very diverse, our data shows that the ‘return of innovation’ is currently more prevalent. It is likely to have a positive influence on the labour productivity, while the effect on labour utilisation is quite complex: more negative on the quantitative aspect of labour utilisation and more positive on the qualitative aspect. Keywords: Migration; return migration; returnees' skills; text mining.