Romania is a country that is “very rich in problems”, sociology professor Dumitru Sandu said in an interview to Romanian news portal Ziare.com as a summary of the reasons why almost half of Romanian youth plan to leave the country within five years.
Earlier this year Sandu – a professor at the Faculty of Sociology at the Bucharest University – held a lecture entitled “Romanian migration – fields on the move” within the European Union’s Youth Mobility project.
Sandu said that in a European Union study on 30,000 youth, Romania, Slovakia and Latvia where the three countries from where more people emigrated than immigrated to, while the top three recipient countries are Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
United Nations statistics showed that at the end of 2017 consisted of 3.58 million people, with the top three destinations for Romanian immigration being Italy, Spain and Germany. Sandu said the main reasons for leaving the country were better job opportunities, joining family and friends and in third place the inadequate functioning of public institutions in Romania.
He also said an increasing trend was the so-called “Euro-commuting” whereby professionals would go abroad for several months at a time to complement their income at better-paid jobs in the West. Sandu also said that in contrast to Poland, where most youth left the country recruited by employment agencies, Romanian youth mostly left the country based on hearsay from friends and family, leading to uninformed decisions and many disappointments.
