Outward Labour Migration in the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia after the EU Enlargement in 2004

This paper analyzes the outward labour migration from the Czech Republic, Poland and Slovakia to predominantly EU15 countries. It describes the incentives for emigration and evaluates the effect of the EU accession in 2004 for all three countries using the regional data. Our empirical estimation suggests that while outward labour migration from Poland was positively related to lagged emigration and negatively related to employment rate and average real wage, this relationship was less obvious and significant in the case of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In addition, our results also imply that the EU accession had only indirect impact on emigration for three countries in question.