Emigration and Unemployment in Lithuania: Correlations, Influencing Factors and Destinations

Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which emigration correlates to unemployment in Lithuania during 1994-2012, unveils the main reasons behind the decision to emigrate and presents the trends among emigrants’ destination countries. Even though there is no unanimous opinion, it is argued that emigration is negatively correlated with unemployment. The Lithuanian case is quite interesting and the numbers in Lithuanian statistics requires a more thorough analysis. The conclusions drawn via IBM SPPS software are quite controversial and show positive correlation, to a certain extent, between emigration and unemployment in Lithuania. The main influences of emigration are extracted via the unique questionnaire and then analysed via different perspectives have a degree of controversy as well. The destination countries compared from two different data sets are quite different, yet, show similar trends.