Determining labour shortages and the need for labour migration from third countries in Belgium

This [European Migration Network] EMN-study focuses on the interconnection between labour shortages in the Belgian labour market and labour migration policy from third counties to Belgium. The study makes clear that even though Belgium has extensive experience in developing sophisticated labour shortages lists and other approaches to detect labour market tensions, the link with labour migration is not fully developed. In practice, Belgium does have a labour migration system that accommodates labour shortages directly and indirectly to a certain degree. First, Belgium (through its regions) developed a flexible labour migration system for certain categories of workers. Highly skilled labour migrants, managers, researchers - to name a few - are categories that enjoy one of the fastest and cheapest labour migration procedures in Europe. This means that for all highly skilled shortage occupations, there already is an attractive procedure in place in Belgium.

Overall, [the authors] conclude that Belgium's labour migration system is soundly based on individual labour market needs of employers, with indirect and direct facilitation for certain labour market shortages. One aspect that is lacking is a thorough monitoring of the occupations for which labour migrants are recruited, which could help to study to which degree labour migration actually helps to tackle shortage occupations. The development of an accurate competence based categorisation of occupations by the Flemish [public employment agencies] PES (for which cooperation with the other regions has been established), would ideally be linked to a labour migration practice that can operate on the basis of clear, coded and categorized occupations.

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