Chapter 11 is a good piece of empirical work, since it helps to understand the peculiarities of Austria and Germany, not only with regard to international migrations (i.e. their impact on employment and wages) but also as regards the broader picture of investments abroad and trade flows with Eastern Europe.

In my opinion, however, some problems arise with regard to the interpretation of the econometric estimates. Even if the reduced-form approach is correctly carried out, the results are sometimes not easy to understand.

Since an articulated model of the functioning of the labour market is not presented, one cannot appreciate if the specification which has been chosen is apt to assure that the coefficients capture just the additional effect of migrations (and segments of them), and of trade on the main labour market variables.

In the case of Germany, we read in the chapter that between 1992 and 1995 almost 1 million jobs were lost, between 1986 and 1993 about 600,000 more foreign workers were employed, but in the following two years foreign workers decreased again by more than 480,000. During the same period, workers from Eastern Europe increased by more than 130,000 until 1993, and decreased by 27,000 thereafter.