It has been estimated that, from October 2020 to October 2022, 15,000 more workers returned to Serbia than left.
Serbia has thus become a country of return, and the reason for this is not the pandemic, the non-profit organization called Point of Return says. The returnees include quite a few IT experts and mechanical engineers, so the inflow of highly educated people is higher than the outflow. Although Germany, for instance, is in chronic need of foreign workers, the cost of living there has doubled so potential savings are minimal.
Germany is in dire need of construction workers, because out of 850,000 workers, 150,000 of them are retiring. Despite this, Nenad Radičević, the RTS correspondent from Germany, says that salaries in that sector have increased slightly in the past period, while the cost of living has risen dramatically in the last two years.
“In fact, the prices of housing and food have almost doubled in two years, despite the fact that official statistics show that inflation was less than ten percent last year. The cost of living has risen so much that the savings of most workers in Germany have been reduced to a minimum”, Radičević points out.
“What we used to call brain drain is not such a big problem now because we actually have a higher inflow than outflow of highly educated people,” says Ivan Brkljač, director of Point of Return.
One of the reasons why Serbian workers in the IT sector are returning is that global companies are now willing to accept remote work. For some returnees, they want to reunite with their families and the cost of babysitters and kindergartens here is much lower than in Great Britain or the United States, for instance.
(RTS, 06.03.2023)