The Study on mobility flows of researchers in the context of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) was launched by the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture of the European Commission. In line with the Commission’s emerging policy priorities, the study provides a detailed analysis of the structure and determinants of researchers’ mobility flows under the MSCA and recommendations on how to achieve a more balanced brain circulation across the European Research Area.
The analysis of geographic mobility trends reveals that inflows of MSCA researchers are concentrated within a handful of EU and Horizon 2020 associated countries, with 12 regions across Europe attracting 30% of all MSCA fellows. Nevertheless, MSCA mobility patterns resemble the general patterns in international scientific mobility, which suggests that the MSCA do not exacerbate the problem of imbalanced research mobility in Europe. Moreover, the MSCA helps to effectively retain European talents, as well as attracting foreign researchers to Europe and encouraging European researchers to return to Europe.
The study also assesses the impact of the Widening Fellowships pilot, which facilitated more balanced brain circulation and contributed to fostering interest in and attracting researchers to widening countries. Finally, the study investigates the possibility of establishing return grants; however, since the MSCA already enable return mobility, particularly in the case of experienced researchers and return mobility to widening countries, the study does not recommend the introduction of a differentiated scheme to promote return mobility to all participating countries.
The following methods were implemented to achieve the results of the study:
- As the key source of evidence for this study, we used Horizon 2020 administrative data on the projects, organisations, and researchers participating in all types of MSC actions: ITN, IF, COFUND and RISE. The analysis of administrative data was enriched by comparing Horizon 2020 with MSCA data from the previous funding period, 7th Framework Programme (FP7), as well as the data on researchers’ mobility collected for the MORE4 study.
- All participating organisations and individual researchers were also surveyed to ensure that enough meaningful data were obtained to explain the trends in mobility flows and to assess the impact of the MSCA and the Widening Fellowships pilot. Over 7 300 survey responses were received, in total.
- In addition, 43 interviews were performed. The insights from these interviews are included within the narrative of the report. Seven out of the 43 interviews targeted the information required for the case studies. The study team organised the first online expert workshop to select topics for the in-depth case studies, as well as to gather experts’ perspectives on the relevant analytical directions for the overall study.