The number of people moving within, from and to Europe is ever increasing, and mobility is projected to grow even more in the future. Managing this mobility and ensuring the successful incorporation of migrants is a key challenge for Europe as a whole and for individual nation states. The Growth, Equal Opportunities, Migration and Markets (GEMM) project is a major multi-disciplinary research proje
ct addressing the challenges and barriers that European countries face in managing the mobility of people in order to ensure competitiveness and growth. The project takes as its starting point two migration related drivers of economic growth:
• The efficient use of existing human capital;
• Managing the mobility of human capital from within and outside Europe. Ethnic inequality can inhibit these two drivers of growth, and societies in which ethnic inequality exists place themselves at risk of a scarcity of skilled labour, an innovation deficit and eventual economic decline. The GEMM project will deliver an in-depth assessment of the two drivers of growth and their relation to ethnic inequality in the European labour market. The project has five core objectives:
• Objective 1 – to outline the factors related to the successful labour market incorporation of migrants;
• Objective 2 – to contribute to the scholarly knowledge of the causes of discrimination, by carrying out a cross-national analysis of ethnic discrimination in the European labour market;
• Objective 3 – to better understand the ability of EU societies to attract human capital by capturing the ‘lived’ experiences of mobility and migration;
• Objective 4 – to analyse how institutional arrangements can reduce ethnic inequality and enhance the two drivers of growth in order to realise a competitive and innovative European labour market;
• Objective 5 – to formulate a set of policy lessons informed by the empirical evidence and our analysis of institutional arrangements.
