Conditions associated with immigration of skilled people

This project explores the social and economical conditions associated with the amount of immigration of skilled people (as visualised in the map below) through visualisation, case-by-case comparison and clustering.

Project Overview

Quantifies how economic (e.g., GDP per capita, salaries) and social factors (e.g., MIPEX, press freedom, corruption) relate to skilled-migrant concentrations across EU countries. Combines exploratory visual analytics, country clusters, and simple k-nearest neighbours to surface patterns.

Data Sources

• Eurostat labour and migration statistics (2021 snapshots for consistency).
• Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.
• MIPEX integration policy scores.
• Supplementary indicators (press freedom, specialty cafes, unemployment, English proficiency) curated from publicly available datasets.

Methodology

1. Assemble and harmonise country-level indicators; resolve missing values via interpolation or manual lookup.
2. Standardise metrics and create composite datasets focused on economic vs. social conditions.
3. Explore relationships through choropleth maps, regression plots, and correlation heatmaps.
4. Cluster countries to compare peer groups and train KNN models to test predictive power of social factors.
5. Evaluate findings with statistical tests (one-tailed two-sample t-test) to gauge significance.

Key Insights

• Economically stronger countries generally host higher shares of foreign-born tertiary graduates, yet sizeable gaps persist between similarly wealthy peers.
• Among lower-income clusters, social indicators (press freedom, corruption perception) better explain variation in skilled-migrant presence.
• Policy levers that strengthen both economic opportunity and social openness appear most promising for attracting skilled migrants.

Repository Layout

• code.ipynb: analysis notebook with cleaning, visuals, clustering, and modelling.
• environment.yml: conda specification for reproducing the notebook environment.
• docs/: presentation and written report.

Further Reading

• docs/report.pdf: two-page narrative of methods and findings.
• docs/presentation.pdf: slide deck illustrating visuals and conclusions.