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MIGRATION, RETURN, AND

HAPPINESS IN ROMANIA
a
David Bartram
a
Department of Sociology , University of Leicester ,
Leicester , UK
Published online: 18 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: David Bartram (2013) MIGRATION, RETURN, AND HAPPINESS IN
ROMANIA, European Societies, 15:3, 408-422, DOI: 10.1080/14616696.2012.726735

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 European Societies,
2013
Vol. 15, No. 3, 408
422,
http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/14616696.
2012.726735

MIGRATION, RETURN, AND HAPPINESS

IN ROMANIA
David Bar tram
Department of Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 07:07 22 December 2014

ABSTRACT: Research on happiness finds that rising incomes do not

generally lead to increases in happiness. This finding suggests that
economic migration
i.e., migration motivated by the prospect of increased
income
might not bring greater happiness: when economic migrants believe
that migration will improve their lives, that belief might be misguided at least
insofar as ‘improvement’ is conceived in terms related to happiness. Perhaps
economic migration under certain conditions even results in lower happiness,
if it involves sacrifices in other respects that are more consequential for
happiness. This paper explores these propositions via comparison of
Romanian migrants to non-migrants (using data from the European Social
Survey) and finds that returned migrants report lower happiness than non-
migrants (controlling for other variables), while migrants who have not
returned are not different in happiness from stayers. The cross-sectional
analysis cannot directly answer questions about the consequences of
migration and return
there are no data on the migrants’ happiness prior to
migration. But the analysis sharpens the questions that might be asked in
future research and considers how various scenarios would be consistent
with the findings produced here.
Key words: International migration; return migration; happiness;
Romania

Introduction

Migration from a poor country to a wealthy one can improve migrants’

economic circumstances
but does it raise their happiness? In general,
increased income does not result in greater happiness, and this core
finding of ‘happiness studies’ can be read to imply that economic
migration would be no more effective in raising happiness than other
means of increasing one’s income. Many migrants believe that gaining
entry to a wealthier country will improve their lives, but insofar as
‘improvement’ would include greater happiness this belief might simply be

408 – 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Migration, return, and happiness in Romania BARTRAM

misguided on average
especially when migration involves sacrifices in

relation to other factors that are more important for happiness than
income.1 More generally, while people in wealthy countries are on average
happier than people in poorer countries, this cross-sectional fact does not
by itself mean that migration to the former leads reliably to increased
happiness for migrants; while prima facie plausible, the assumption that it
does amounts to an ecological fallacy.
Empirical research that does justice to the ‘longitudinal’ nature of this
question carries stringent data demands, including measurement of
happiness (and other variables) prior to migration, not just afterwards.
Most existing large-scale data collection efforts do not satisfy this
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condition, primarily because most panel data-sets are constructed as

‘national’ entities, e.g., the British Household Panel Survey. If a panel
member emigrates then he or she is a casualty of ‘attrition’. In destination
countries, immigrants
to the extent they are represented in panels at all

do not contribute data collected prior to their immigration. There are,
then, significant data limitations inhibiting the study of international
migration, particularly with respect to consequences for the migrants.
In lieu of a direct test of the question regarding migrants generally, this
paper therefore considers the happiness of two Romanian migrant groups:
those living in another European country and those who have returned
home after working abroad, in comparison to Romanians who have not
migrated. Romanians gained access to the labor markets of Britain, Ireland
and Sweden with EU accession in 2007, but there is a longer history of
undocumented migration and large numbers of migrant workers em-
ployed in Italy, Spain and Germany (Culic 2008). The data available allow
only a cross-sectional analysis and cannot provide definitive conclusions
about the happiness consequences of this migration. Still, the results of
the comparison help sharpen the questions that might be addressed in
future research. The main empirical finding of the paper is that
Romanians who emigrated and then returned home are less happy,
controlling for other variables, than those who did not leave; migrants
abroad, however, are not different in happiness from stayers.

Previous research on happiness, income, and migration

As in much research on happiness, the question posed here is rooted in the

‘Easterlin paradox’ and the finding that increases in income generally do

1. An equivalent mistake among non-migrants would be the relentless pursuit of

economic growth and the failure to use increased productivity as a means of reducing
working hours (Bartolini 2007).

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 EUROPEAN SOCIETIES

not result in increased happiness (Easterlin 1974). In a cross-sectional

analysis, those who earn more are generally happier than those who earn
less, and people in wealthier countries are happier than people in poorer
ones (though the association is not particularly strong). But economic
growth
at least in relatively wealthy countries
appears to contribute
little or nothing to happiness. This conclusion is particularly evident in
Japan, where several decades of rapid growth saw no change in average
levels of happiness (Easterlin 2005). This argument informs the dominant
perspective regarding income in happiness studies, and although it has not
gone unchallenged (e.g., Stevenson and Wolfers 2008), there is no
indication that happiness researchers generally have abandoned the view
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that economic growth contributes little to happiness (e.g., Easterlin et al.

2010), though again some dispute it.
Economic growth might not even be merely benign in its consequences for
happiness. Growth is not only a matter of ‘more’ in a quantitative sense

growth leads to qualitative changes in individuals’ lives, changes that might
be experienced as a ‘dislocation’ in perhaps uncomfortable ways (Graham
2009). Deaton (2008) and Lora and Chaparro (2009) find evidence of
an ‘unhappy growth paradox’: controlling for GDP levels, a higher growth
rate predicts lower satisfaction with life2 (as well as lower satisfaction in more
specific domains e.g., jobs and housing). A key mechanism emerges in the
way economic growth results in increased aspirations. That mechanism
resonates also with Graham and Pettinato’s (2002) notion of ‘happy peasants
and frustrated achievers’: poorer people might moderate their material
aspirations while relatively wealthy people experience rising expectations.
Rising income in general, then, appears not to contribute to happiness,
and life choices emphasizing pursuit of income might lead to some
disappointment (Kahneman et al. 2006). Several interrelated psychological
processes are important here. One is adaptation: we might initially gain
greater satisfaction from a higher income and the purchases it facilitates,
but this gain quickly erodes (Frederick and Loewenstein 1999; cf. Scitovsky
1992). A second process is aspiration: what matters for happiness in this
regard is the degree to which income matches income aspirations, and
income increases are typically followed by an increase in aspirations, i.e.,
for even greater income (Easterlin 2001; Stutzer 2003). The third process,
rooted in the notion that money/income is in part a positional good, is
social comparison
and many people are inclined to give more weight to
upward comparisons, to their detriment (Boyce et al. 2010). Following an
increase in income, people sometimes alter their reference groups for

2. Life satisfaction is commonly considered equivalent in many ways to happiness, and

empirical results usually do not differ for use of happiness vs. life satisfaction
questions/variables.

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 Migration, return, and happiness in Romania BARTRAM

comparison: instead of gaining satisfaction from giving salience to one’s

improved position relative to a stable reference group, increased income
leads some to compare themselves to an even wealthier reference group
(Clark et al. 2008). These processes help account for the finding that those
inclined towards materialist pursuits generally report lower levels of
psychological well-being (including happiness) than those who prioritize
other types of goals (Richins and Dawson 1992; Frank 1999).

Implications for migration

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These findings, derived from the study of happiness and income generally,
suggest that a higher income gained via migration might be no more
effective in raising happiness than a higher income gained by other means.
A fundamental problem for migrants is the likelihood of discrepancy
between prior expectations and realities after migration (Vohra and Adair
2000; Knight and Gunatilaka 2010). The evolution of aspirations might
pose particular difficulties for migrants insofar as they experience direct
exposure to the consumption standards of wealthier societies (as against
indirect exposure, e.g., via television): any increase in income might be
outweighed by an increase in income aspirations following migration. A
similar prediction emerges for comparisons: migration might be dis-
advantageous insofar as one’s relative position in the destination country is
likely to be lower than in the origin country, particularly since difficulties
with language and unrecognized qualifications often mean that those who
were middle-class in the origin encounter obstacles to gaining middle-class
jobs in the destination (Portes and Bach 1985). At an early stage economic
migrants are often willing to endure lower status (Piore 1979), but over
time one’s reference group will likely come to include (wealthier) people in
the destination, with unfavorable consequences for happiness. Happiness
is determined in part by personality/temperament, and if the migration
decision was rooted in a sense of frustrated ambitions then one might find
that that feeling persists after migration even if one achieves economic
gains (Graham 2009).
Given the data limitations noted earlier, research on migration and
happiness typically compares immigrants to natives in the destination
country. Cross-sectional data show that immigrants in wealthy countries
typically report lower happiness than natives, controlling for other
determinants (e.g., Bălţătescu 2007a; Bartram 2011). In research on
immigrants in Europe the happiness disadvantage of immigrants does not
diminish over time, contrary to what one would expect from an assimilation
paradigm (Safi 2010). Knight and Gunatilaka (2010) analyze rural-to-urban
migrants in China and find that happiness among migrants was lower than

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 EUROPEAN SOCIETIES

among stayers in rural villages and lower also in comparison to urban non-
migrants (despite migrants having earnings comparable to those of urban
non-migrants). Their analysis suggests that migrants have false expectations
about life in urban settings, and that migrants fail to anticipate that their
own aspirations (e.g., about income) will rise after migration.
It is perhaps unsurprising that research in this mode finds that
immigrants are less happy than natives, given difficulties of economic
integration and the likelihood of a downward trajectory of relative position.
But a different approach to comparison considers the situation of migrants
relative to those who remain in the country of origin. In particular,
temporary migration to a wealthier country followed by return might be
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a more promising path to greater happiness: if migrants can gain skills

and accumulate savings while abroad, the result upon returning home
might be a higher relative position (in comparison to their position prior to
migration). This possibility is all the more relevant for migration
originating in poorer countries, given that the cross-sectional association
between income/status and happiness is stronger there than in wealthier
countries, as evident in Delhey’s (2004) research on Central/Eastern
Europe (cf. Bălţătescu 2007b). That point also suggests (in contrast to
the implications derived from the Easterlin paradox) that migrants
from eastern European countries might gain happiness via migration to
wealthier countries in the west. The remainder of this paper then considers
Romanian-origin migrants of both types in comparison to Romanians
without migration experience.

Data and methods

To evaluate the association between migration and happiness among

Romanians, I analyze data on Romanians from the European Social
Survey (Jowell 2007), drawing on the fourth round (2009); the overall
sample size was 2,167.
The common practice for measurement in happiness studies is self-
report on surveys (Diener et al. 1999); confidence regarding validity of such
measures is high (Frey and Stutzer 2002; Pavot 2008), and the concerns that
do exist are likely not consequential for the analysis presented here. Data on
happiness here come from answers to the question, ‘Taking all things
together, how happy would you say you are?’. Options for answers were
given on an 11-point scale, with 0 indicating ‘extremely unhappy’, 10
indicating ‘extremely happy’, and the intervening nine options unlabeled.
The main independent variable of interest is migration experience,
particularly migration motivated by the prospect of economic gain. In
regard to returned migrants, the analysis here turns on answers to a

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 Migration, return, and happiness in Romania BARTRAM

question asking whether during the last 10 years respondents have done
any paid work in another country for at least 6 months. The yes/no
options enable a direct comparison between those with migration
experience involving paid employment and those lacking such experience
(variable labeled ‘returnee’). Roughly 5% of those providing valid answers
in this sample answered yes to this question.3
The other group of interest for comparison is emigrants from Romania
currently living abroad. The sample analyzed here thus includes residents
of other ESS countries who indicate they were born in Romania, labeled
‘migrant’; this group is similar in size to the group of returnees. Most
Romanian emigrants in this sample (82%) are located in western
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European countries, particularly Spain and Germany4
not a surprising

fact if one expects migration to be motivated mainly by desire for the
higher incomes available in wealthier countries. Most of those migrating to
another eastern European country are in Hungary, reflecting long-
standing trans-border ties in that region.
A number of variables are included as controls. Prior research
(summarized e.g., in Diener and Seligman 2004 and Dolan et al. 2008)
establishes that happiness is associated with a variety of factors, among
which the most important are health, unemployment, religiosity, marriage
(or other forms of partnering), and participation in social activities.
Respondents reported the state of their health on a 5-point scale (1 is
excellent, and so the regression coefficient is expected to be negative). For
unemployment, a variable was created from answers to a question
regarding ‘main activity in the last 7 days’, where unemployment was
coded 1 if main activity involved unemployment whether actively seeking
a job or not; all other responses were coded 0 (i.e., not unemployed).
Religiosity is measured on an 11-point scale in response to the question,
‘How religious are you?’; 0 is ‘not religious at all’ and 10 is ‘very religious’.
For marriage/intimate relationships, what matters is not being married
per se but living with an intimate partner. ESS data offer a derived
variable that indicates directly whether the respondent is living with a
spouse or partner. Frequency of participation in social activities is gauged
with the question, ‘how often do you meet socially with friends, relatives
or work colleagues?’.
Happiness in cross-sectional comparisons is also associated with one’s
economic situation, and the analysis here includes household income as a
control. The ESS income question asks respondents to select from a set of

3. A significant percentage did not provide valid answers to this question, a point that
accounts for the failure of the column totals for the different groups in Table 1 to sum
to the sample size.
4. Italy is another common destination but did not participate in Round 4 of the ESS.

413
 EUROPEAN SOCIETIES

TABLE 1. Characteristics of Romanian stayers, returnees, and migrants

All Stayers Returnees Migrants

Happiness 6.1 6.2 5.9 6.4

(SD) 2.2 2.1 2.2 2.3
Age 45.8 47.9 37.2 40.3
(SD) 17.5 16.0 11.2 13.2
% Male 45.1 48.6 57.5 42.3
% Partner 60.7 67.0 48.8 76.1
% Unemployed 4.2 2.7 10.0 14.1
Health 2.5 2.5 2.2 2.2
(SD) 1.0 0.9 0.8 0.9
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Religiosity 6.7 6.7 6.4 5.7

(SD) 2.3 2.3 2.3 2.9
Sociability 3.8 3.7 3.9 4.0
(SD) 1.8 1.7 1.8 1.8
Income 5.4 5.9 6.3 4.8
(SD) 3.3 3.2 3.3 2.4
N 2167 1442 80 73

10 ranges, deriving from country-specific deciles. This approach facilitates

consideration of income in a relative sense (e.g., Ball and Chernova 2008),
particularly when considering people living in different countries:
Romanians living in other countries have to meet expenses in their local
context, and they might also compare their economic situation to that of
the people around them. The analysis also includes variables on gender
and age; usually an additional age-squared term is added to reflect non-
linear association, i.e., lower happiness during middle age with rising
happiness subsequently
but this term was not significant in any model
here and was therefore dropped.
Characteristics of the sample are given in Table 1 (showing means/
standard deviations or percentages as appropriate), with separate values

TABLE 2. Distribution of happiness scores (%), by migration status

Stayers Returnees Migrants

Extremely unhappy 1.3 1.3 2.8

1 1.1 2.5 2.8
2 3.7 5.1 0.0
3 5.1 2.5 4.2
4 7.9 8.9 4.2
5 17.2 21.5 14.1
6 15.2 17.7 18.3
7 19.9 16.5 19.7
8 17.6 10.1 16.9
9 7.6 10.1 11.3
Extremely happy 3.5 3.8 5.6

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 Migration, return, and happiness in Romania BARTRAM

provided also for non-migrants (‘stayers’), returnees, and migrants. Table 2

shows the distribution of responses in the happiness variable for each
group.

Analysis and results

The dependent variable is happiness, originating in a question with 11

options for response. This variable is ordinal, and in principle the
appropriate form of analysis would be an ordered probit model. However,
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given the relatively large number of response options ordinary least

squares (OLS) regression can be expected to produce equivalent results
(Ferrer-i-Carbonell and Frijters 2004 make this point with particular
reference to research on happiness), and indeed for results below the issue
of OLS versus ordered probit makes no difference, with one partial
exception as noted. OLS regression is therefore adopted for ease of
interpretation and the availability of standardized coefficients.
In a bivariate comparison, Romanians who live abroad and those who
returned did not report significantly different levels of happiness from
those without migration experience (6.4 and 5.9 vs. 6.2). But this
comparison is misleading in failing to control for age in particular:
migrants are generally younger, younger people are generally happier, and
any association of migration with happiness might be masked by a
countervailing influence of age when age is not controlled. If we control
for age alone (Model 2 in Table 3) we see that returnees are more than half
a point less happy than stayers on average (p 0.034), while there is no
difference in the happiness of migrants and stayers.
That pattern persists in Model 3, with a full set of control variables.
Other variables behave as expected. Happiness is higher among those who
have better health and higher incomes; those who report being more
religious are also happier, as are those who live with a spouse or partner,
those who participate more frequently in social activities, and those who
are not unemployed. There is evidence of heteroskedasticity for this
model, but in a ‘robust regression’ analysis (not shown) employing a more
realistic approach to calculating standard errors given heteroskedasticity
one arrives at identical conclusions for hypothesis tests at conventional
significance levels.5
A key issue arises in a comparison between Models 3 and 4, where the
latter excludes income as a control variable. We can learn more from the

5. The only potential departure from these conclusions emerges in an ordered probit
model that uses robust standard errors: here, the ‘return’ coefficient is significant only
at a less demanding threshold, with p 0.054.

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EUROPEAN SOCIETIES
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TABLE 3. OLS regression results for determinants of happiness, Romanians

b p  jzj b b p  jzj b b p  jzj b b p  jzj b

Migrant 0.28 0.280 0.027 0.05 0.832 0.005 0.35 0.214 0.033 0.14 0.554 0.015
Returnee 0.21 0.389 0.022 0.51 0.034 0.054 0.56 0.031 0.056 0.32 0.161 0.034
Age 0.03 0.000 0.212 0.01 0.026 0.067 0.01 0.002 0.084
Male 0.09 0.421 0.022 0.05 0.617 0.013
Religiosity 0.17 0.000 0.175 0.15 0.000 0.165
Partner 0.40 0.001 0.087 0.49 0.000 0.109
Unemployed 0.73 0.015 0.064 0.73 0.007 0.066
Sociability 0.19 0.000 0.151 0.21 0.000 0.164
Health 0.59 0.000 0.257 0.60 0.000 0.264
Income 0.09 0.000 0.135
Constant 6.16 0.000 7.51 0.000 5.29 0.000 6.03 0.000

N 1555 1538 1217 1433

F 1.01 24.02 31.27 33.96
Prob  F 0.366 0.000 0.000 0.000
Adj R2 0.000 0.043 0.200 0.172
 Migration, return, and happiness in Romania BARTRAM

difference between these models than from an attempt to determine which

model is ‘right’. If our goal were to explain as much variation in happiness
as possible, then we would want to emphasize a model that includes
income. But the goal here is to gauge the association between migration
and happiness. In that context
a context in which many individuals are
attempting to gain more income via migration
it is not clear that income
should be controlled. Many people become migrants in hopes of raising
their incomes. The Easterlin paradox suggests that gaining more income
does not in general bring greater happiness, but for the analysis here we
should allow for the possibility that migrants might be different in this
respect (cf. Bartram 2011). Particularly in a cross-sectional analysis in
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which income is demonstrably associated with happiness, it is not obvious

that income is something one should control for when trying to
understand the happiness consequences of economic migration, given
the possibility that higher incomes might have been achieved via
migration. In particular, returned migrants might have achieved a higher
relative position in the Romanian income ranking
perhaps via the
accumulation of skills and savings (e.g., capital for small business) while
abroad
with favorable consequences for happiness.
The cross-sectional data available here cannot provide a definitive
answer to these questions, but it is illuminating all the same in the way it
narrows the range of possible answers. In Model 4 where income is not
controlled, the coefficient for ‘returnee’ is negative but not statistically
significant: returnees in the population might be less happy than stayers in
this model, but we cannot be confident that that difference is not merely a
consequence of sampling error.
Still, in a model that does not control for income a coefficient for
‘returnee’ that is not appreciably different from zero is notable for what it
is not. Given the generally positive and significant cross-sectional
association between income and happiness, and given that returnees
have higher incomes than stayers (as in Table 1), in a model that omits
income as a control one would expect returnees to have greater happiness
than stayers, ceteris paribus. In other words, the returnee variable ought to
proxy for the income variable when the income variable is omitted. But
again the ‘returnee’ coefficient is not significantly different from zero.
Even though we do not have data about happiness or income prior to
migration, by comparing the two models we see a noteworthy difference
between hypothesized and actual findings: returnees have higher incomes,
but they are nonetheless not happier than stayers.
Romanians currently living in other countries, however, earn incomes
that place them in a lower position in ‘local’ income distributions: at a
mean decile position of 4.8, they are a full ‘point’ lower than Romanian
non-migrants (5.9). That finding is consistent with more general

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 EUROPEAN SOCIETIES

scholarship on migration, as noted earlier: migrants often earned well in

local terms prior to migration and then find it difficult to achieve a
comparable position in the destination country. Here, whether one
controls for income or not, there is no significant difference in the
happiness of migrants vs. stayers. Migrants might have been expecting to
gain from earning higher (‘absolute’) incomes in a wealthier country, but
their position in relative terms is relatively low (at least in comparison to
other Romanians). Another key point is their high unemployment rate, at
14% (perhaps partly attributable to very high unemployment rates in
Spain, a significant destination for Romanian migrants).
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Discussion

The results described earlier emerge from a cross-sectional analysis and do

not allow us to offer a direct answer to the question motivating this paper.
That question asks about the consequences of migration: does migration/
return lead to an increase (or decrease) in happiness? Lacking data on
happiness prior to migration, we cannot know whether the lower
happiness of returnees (relative to stayers) represents a decrease over time.
In research on a different context (Latin America), Graham and
Markowitz (2011) show that people who express an intention to migrate
are generally less happy than others. (They also find reasons to be
confident that these intentions are frequently realized in migration itself.)
If that pattern were replicated among migrants from (and returning to)
Romania, the implication for findings here would be that returned
migrants have not improved their happiness (as against a conclusion that
migration followed by return results in lower happiness). Returnees might
also have been earning more prior to migration than stayers: Graham and
Markowitz’s (2011) ‘frustrated achiever’ concept indicates that people who
become migrants tend to earn more than others even before migration
(but are less happy than others, i.e., ‘frustrated’). If true for Romanians

if migration did not result in increased post-return earnings
then the
common-sense basis for expecting an increase in happiness is absent. But
even a more optimistic scenario in which migration has facilitated
improvement in migrants’ post-return economic situation apparently
does not extend to optimism about the happiness consequences of this
improvement. If improved earning ability does have favorable conse-
quences for returned migrants, the fact that they are less happy than
stayers suggests that there might also be negative consequences, perhaps
even to the point of outweighing the positive ones.
Panel data representing all three groups (non-migrants, emigrants, and
returned migrants) would greatly enhance prospects for research

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 Migration, return, and happiness in Romania BARTRAM

determining the prevalence of the different choices and their association

with changes (if any) in happiness. While producing data of this sort poses
logistical challenges, it ought to be possible on a reasonably general way at
least for migration within Europe, via research mechanisms of the
European Union.
Motivations for migration vary; this article has considered migration
rooted in economic motivations, but some migration choices are informed
by different goals, including relationships and lifestyle (e.g., Benson and
O’Reilly 2009). The difficult economic situation faced by many Romanians
in recent years supports the assumption that economic issues would have
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featured prominently in motivations for emigration from Romania. But the

points about income and happiness considered here might be tangential to
migration undertaken for family reunification or other relationships, for
example. A broader research goal would be to determine the different
circumstances and contexts that account for different happiness conse-
quences of migration.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Sergiu Bălţătescu for suggestions on an earlier draft.

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David Bartram is Senior Lecturer in sociology at the University of Leicester.

His current research investigates the relationship between immigration
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and happiness, in particular the assumption that migration to a wealthy

country is advantageous to the migrants themselves. His earlier work
focused on non-Jewish migrant workers in Israel and migrant worker
policies in Japan, with articles appearing in International Migration
Review, Politics & Society and Ethnopolitics as well as a book published
by Palgrave. He taught previously at the University of Reading and
at Haverford College (USA); he holds a PhD from the University of
Wisconsin
Madison and a BA from Kenyon College.

Address for correspondence: David Bartram, Department of Sociology,

University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK.
E-mail: [email protected]

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