Where do young people wish to settle down, and why? Exploring current trends in mobility is vital for regional integration and prosperity, planning provisions and projections. The future of rural municipalities in the Nordic region has been a subject of concern during the last decades, specifically the aging of the population in rural areas, with skills mismatch and labour shortages as consequents. Understanding the future intentions and migration plans of young people today is the key enabler for the Nordic Region to achieve its goal of becoming the most sustainable and integrated region in the world.
How urban areas attract the increasingly skilled workforce with higher wages, exciting career options, cultural diversity and liberal attitudes has been widely studied, both in the Nordic context and globally. A recent map produced by Nordregio presenting the typology of internal net migration 2020-2021 compared to 2018-2019 indicates an increasing out-migration from larger cities in the Nordic region, both as growing suburbanisation patterns close to bigger towns and cities, but there are also positive examples and tendencies that more sparsely populated municipalities are growing (Jensen & Randall, 2022, p.52-53). Plausible explanatory factors of this trend are the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalisation, the emerging opportunities for remote work, and rising property prices in urban areas. Furthermore, the increasing popularity of lifestyle migration and downshifting offers an interesting framework for analysing the migration decisions of young people.
New jobs are popping up in Nordic rural areas in great numbers where industries supporting the green transition of the economy are rapidly emerging. These industries need specialised workforce from multidisciplinary fields, in municipalities already short on labour for the hard and soft infrastructure necessary for attractive towns and rural areas.
Learning more about current migration drivers and migration aspirations of the early career cohorts in the Nordic countries will help policymakers to shape the future of Nordic labour markets and better prepare the future labour supply and demands in rural areas. This working paper will present the main findings from previous studies on migration drivers and will serve as a baseline for the data collection on migration history and migration aspirations of young people in the Nordic countries.