Mihail Arandarenko, a professor at the Faculty of Economics at the University of Belgrade, said that migration from Serbia is mostly for work and in most cases temporary.
Arandarenko, the author of the chapter on migration in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development Report for 2022, told Blic daily that claims about tens of thousands of people leaving Serbia every year are based on “superficial and fundamentally wrong interpretations”.
“We are talking about the total number of departures, but a large number of our emigrants statistically stay only temporarily abroad and then return to Serbia,” Arandarenko said.
According to him, the character of emigration to Serbia has changed recently and he explained that people used to emigrate permanently, whereas now they leave for a short time, “to earn money and come back”.
“If we look at the net outflow from Serbia, it probably does not exceed 10,000 people on average per year over the past ten years,” Professor Arandarenko said.
(021.rs, 10.07.2022)