Work Package 2
Work package 2 addresses the issue of human capital and science labour markets. It addresses two dimensions of inequality. Firstly, the issue of individual equity and equality of opportunity in science careers and secondly, the impact of scientific career decision-making and mobility, in particular, on regional inequality and balanced growth. The tension between these two linked dimensions of equality is recognised in the European Research Area strategy. It promises to have impact on our understanding of some of the basic and longstanding issues on human resource issues centred on the role of migration and scientific diasporas in national technological capacity-building and retention, as the basis for the development of an evidence-based approach to policy-making at both national and European level.
These include the form barriers to mobility take for third country nationals; the effect of life-course, partnering and parenting on mobility and the (gendered) effects of this on the demographic and social balance of scientific labour markets in sending and receiving regions; the extent to which international migration spawns other forms of knowledge generation and transfer which are not directly related to physical presence, such as diasporic networks and more specific forms of scientific exchange; the extent to which individual countries, and the EU, is reliant on attracting third country researchers to meet skills shortages; and the extent to which sending countries in the developing world benefit or lose from the mobility of researchers.
This empirical work will be framed by an analysis of the tensions in EU human resource policies. Then work package aims to contribute directly to policy with papers organised around four sets of issues:
- Opening access to employment in the European Union for Third Country Researchers
- Understanding scientific migration and location decision-making
- Employment as a Scarce Resource: Issues of Individual Equity in Science Careers
- The relationship between human mobility and the transfer of knowledge/capacity building
WP2 Milestones and expected results
| Time | Expected Results |
|---|---|
| Month 9 | Framework Papers on World Regional Contexts |
| Month 11 | Four national reports |
| Month 28 | Four thematic papers drawing on the national reports and the empirical work in the partner countries |
| Month 24 | Production of three short policy oriented reports |
| Months 28-30 | Contribution to across team synthesis and stakeholder engagement in world regional meetings under WP0 |