Trinity College Dublin is collaborating with universities in Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal on a survey of people who have recently left these countries in the context of the current economic crisis.

Over the past five years, residents of Southern Europe and Ireland have been hard hit by economic crises and austerity measures, facing high levels of unemployment, a fall in salaries and welfare benefits, and a substantial deterioration of their professional development and quality of life. The employment crisis seems to have hit the young more than other age groups, with youth unemployment ranging between 29 percent and 58 percent in these countries.

It appears that many people have responded by leaving for other countries or continents. There has been a lot of media focus on these new waves of mobility and emigration, however we need to know more about who is actually leaving, where they are going, why they are departing, and what this means for the economies and societies of Southern Europe and Ireland.

This online survey is part of a research initiative aiming to understand whether and in what ways the ongoing crisis has affected migration and mobility in the EU, and particularly in Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

The project is coordinated by the Global Governance Programme of the European University Institute, Florence (Dr. Anna Triandafyllidou and Dr. Roubini Gropas) together with the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid (Dr. Carmen González Enríquez), Trinity College Dublin (Dr. Camilla Devitt), and the Technical University of Lisbon (Dr. João Peixoto).

The survey will run online from the 23rd of May to the 20th of July 2013.

The first data analysis will be published in October 2013.