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This report of the BRIDGES project investigates as to how locally dominant and EU-promoted narratives related to migration, interact and influence the decision-making of potential migrants in the Gambia. The study is based on focus groups and in-depth interviews with 60 Gambian youngsters who think about migrating abroad. The report starts by outlining the dominant - or Master - narratives on migration and Europe in the Gambia. These narratives put to the forefront the opportunities for a positive life change enabled by a person migrating to Europe. Europe is associated with (professional or educational) opportunities and a probability of getting high(er) living standards and achieving social mobility. Practically every participant tended to see a positive cost-benefit calculus in favour of migration, yet some considered the risks to outweigh the benefits of irregular migration. The research shows that the messages promoted in EU-funded information campaigns struggle to unfold an influence in view of the dominant Master narratives on migration and Europe. Aggregately speaking, potential migrants in the Gambia rely little on the information of EU-funded campaigns when making decisions. The exception are potential migrants who are already sensitive about the risks of the journey. The campaigns are able to reinforce existing doubts, thereby tipping the overall calculus in some cases. That said, information is only one factor among others influencing migratory decision-making. More relevant ones are the actual livelihood opportunities or a lack of prospects in the Gambia as well as the social prestige that can be gained through migration.

Polymeric coatings are used as a protective layer to preserve food or beverage quality and protect it from corrosion and avoid a metallic taste. These types of materials can contain some chemicals that are susceptible to migrate to food and constitute a risk for consumers’ health. This study is focused on the identification of volatile and semi-volatile low molecular weight compounds present in polymeric coatings used for metal food and beverage cans. A method based on solid–liquid extraction followed by gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC-MS) was optimized for the semi-volatile compounds. Different solvents were tried with the aim of extracting compounds with different polarities. Furthermore, a method based on solid-phase microextraction (SPME) in headspace (HS) mode and gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry (HSSPME-GC-MS) was developed for the identification of potential volatile migrants in polymeric coatings. Some parameters such as extraction time, equilibrium temperature, or the type of fiber were optimized. Different compounds, including aldehydes such as octanal or nonanal, alcohols such as α-terpineol or 2-butoxyethanol, ethers, alkenes, or phthalic compounds, among others, were identified and confirmed with analytical standards both via SPME analysis as well after solvent extraction This research was funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, by the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional (FEDER), and by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación Ref. No. PGC2018-094518-B-I00 “MIGRACOATING” (MICIU/FEDER, UE). The authors are grateful to the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades for the predoctoral fellowship (ref. PRE2019-088195) awarded to P.V.-L.; A.L.-C. is grateful for her grant Programa de axudas á etapa predoutoral da Xunta de Galicia (Consellería de Cultura, Educación e Ordenación Universitaria) SI

IntroductionMigration continues to be one of the most pressing and difficult issues in global society and in Russian society in particular. Places of military, political, and economic instability face economic problems, the destruction of a traditional way of life, growing tensions, and people's uncertainty in regard to the future. All these factors facilitate the growth of migration flows.The academic corpus of literature contains numerous works on migration. The first academic definition of migration was given by Ravenstein (1985, p. 168).[Migration is] a permanent or a temporary change of place of residence by a person; [this is] a continuous process depending on the interactions among four main groups of factors. They are factors that influence a migrant's initial place (country) of residence; factors that influence the stage of a migrant's move; factors that influence a migrant's destination (country); factors of a personal nature, which include, primarily, a system of personal preferences, a totality of personal demographic characteristics.Most articles about migration refer to the acculturation of migrants and acculturation modeling (Berry, 1992; Khrustaleva, 1996; Gurieva, Kinunen, 2006; Pavlenko, 2001); the ethnic identity of migrants (Gurieva & Kinunen, 2006; Lebedeva, 2001; Pavlenko, 2001; Stefanenko, 1999); the dynamics of migration and adaptation issues (Belinskaya & Stefanenko, 2000; Hutnik & Barrett, 2003; Jasinskaja-Lahti, 2000; Schwartz, 1992), along with many other aspects of migration. however, there are significantly fewer articles on the psychology of potential migrants (Gurieva K Liebkind, 2001; Mirsky, 2001; Tartakovsky, 2007; Zilber & Lerner, 1996). There are no social, psychological, or sociological articles that compare different types of potential and actual migrants or forced and voluntary migrants or that identify migrants' common and specific characteristics depending on the environment of their place of residence in a single administrative entity within the boundaries of the single environment of the Russian Federation.In today's ever-changing Russian society, there have been changes not only in the types and direction of migration but also in the characteristics of the migration processes: conditions and types of migration, social and psychological characteristics of migrants, factors determining their successful adaptation and acculturation, their motivation, their features, and many other social, demographic, and psychological characteristics. Therefore, the issues that have been researched are not the kinds of migration, their stages and types, for example, but, instead, the main causes of migration. For example, ethnic migration is known to be a con- sequence of interethnic conflicts, ethnic tensions, ethnic discrimination, and lost social and cultural identity by a certain part of the population. Labor migration can be a consequence of a deep economic crisis, social and economic instability, lost jobs, and increasing poverty and unemployment within a complex political situation in general.Migration can take two forms: forced and voluntary. The most difficult for regulation are forced forms, as they have a spontaneous and massive character; they transform the existing structure of the society. Voluntary migration is generally the more regulated process. It is neither massive, nor natural; it is partially distributed in time. With voluntary migration, structural components of the society survive instead of being transformed (Table 1).[Table omitted, see PDF.]Migration as both the internal and the external relocation of people should be regulated, controlled, instead of being a spontaneous social phenomenon. In each area, as the survey of locals has shown, there are predictors of internal and external migration that we need to be aware of in order to anticipate and manage complex migration flows. There are three key factors in the migration patterns of Pskov Region residents: (1) unemployment, no jobs against a background of destroyed industrial infrastructure; (2) psychological dissatisfaction, depressed mood (no facilities for leisure, relaxation, family pastimes; lack of careers and prospects for the future); (3) social isolation, poorly developed infrastructure: seasonal isolation, lack of road networks, difficulties getting to hospitals, schools, clinics. …

The authors investigate determinants of individual migration decisions in Vietnam, a country with increasingly high levels of geographical labor mobility. Using data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey (VHLSS) of 2012, the authors find that probability of migration is strongly associated with individual, household and community-level characteristics. The probability of migration is higher for young people and those with post-secondary education. Migrants are more likely to be from households with better-educated household heads, female-headed households, and households with higher youth dependency ratios. Members of ethnic minority groups are much less likely to migrate, other things equal. Using multinomial logit methods, we distinguish migration by broad destination, and find that those moving to Ho Chi Minh City or Hanoi have broadly similar characteristics and drivers of migration to those moving to other destinations. The authors also use VHLSS 2012 together with VHLSS 2010, which allows us to focus on a narrow cohort of recent migrants, those present in the household in 2010, but who have moved away by 2012. This yields much tighter results. For education below upper secondary school, the evidence on positive selection by education is much stronger. However, the ethnic minority ‘penalty’ on spatial labor mobility remains strong and significant, even after controlling for specific characteristics of households and communes. This lack of mobility is a leading candidate to explain the distinctive persistence of poverty among Vietnam’s ethnic minority populations, even as national poverty has sharply diminished.

China has used two main spatial policies to shape its geographic patterns of development: restricted labor mobility through the Hukou residential registration system and massive infrastructure investment, notably a 96,000 kilometer national expressway network. This paper develops a structural new economic geography model to examine the impacts of these policies. Fitting the model to available data allows simulating counterfactual scenarios comparing each policy’s respective impact on regional economic development and urbanization patterns across China. The results suggest large overall economic benefits from constructing the national expressway network and abolishing the Hukou system. Yet, the spatial impacts of the two policies are very different. The construction of the national expressway network reinforced existing urbanization patterns. The initially lagging regions not connected to the network have not benefitted much from its construction. By contrast, removal of the Hukou restrictions, which Chinese policy makers are considering, would result in much more widespread welfare gains, allowing everyone to gain by moving to where he or she is most productive. Removal of the Hukou restrictions would also promote urbanization in currently lagging (inland) regions, mostly by stimulating rural to urban migration.

The potential of an advanced analytical strategy based on the use of gas chromatography (GC) coupled to high resolution mass spectrometry (HRMS) with two different analyzers and ionization sources has been investigated and applied to the non-target analysis of food packaging contaminants. Initially, the approach based on GC–time-of-flight (TOF) MS with electron ionization (EI) source allowed performing a library search and mass accurate measurements of selected ions. Then, a second analysis was performed using hybrid quadrupole (Q) TOF MS with an atmospheric pressure chemical ionization (APCI) source in order to search for the molecular ion or the protonated molecule and study the fragmentation behavior. This analytical strategy was applied to the analysis of four polypropylene/ethylene vinyl alcohol/polypropylene (PP/EVOH/PP) multilayer trays and one PP/Al foil/PP film, each one subjected to migration assays with the food simulants isooctane and Tenax®, in order to investigate its potential on the determination of migrant substances. Generalitat Valenciana (research group of excellence): PROMETEO/2009/054; ISIC 2012/016

This paper uses micro data from the Demographic National Survey and the Census in Romania (2002-2003) and in Countries that have received large number of Romanian immigrants over the period 1990-2000 (US, Austria and Spain) to identify the wage earning ability (skills) of migrants and returnees relative to non-migrants. This determines what is called 'selection'. Using observable characteristics (education, age, gender and family status) that affect wage earning abilities of non-migrant, migrants to specific countries and returnees the authors can construct measures of average selection across skills for each skill group. Also, by observing the actual wages of these groups in Romania, US, Austria and Spain the author can measure the average and the skills-specific premium for migrating and for returning. As the three receiving countries differ in their skill compensation structure we can test the hypothesis that migration to a country is larger for those groups that receive higher migration premium. The authors find strong support for the idea that migrants in different skill groups move depending on the premium that they will get in the receiving country. Similarly the authors find evidence of a premium to returnee that is increasing in their skills, which drives positive selection of returnees. As migration and return seem consistent with optimal utility-maximizing choices of individuals the authors use a model of education, migration and return to predict the effects of increasing international mobility on skill and wage of Romanians. The authors find average positive long-run effect on average skills and wages in Romania from relaxing migration constraint.