Abstract:

The Bologna Declaration was signed in 1999 to establish a European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by 2010. In order to achieve this objective the European Union is working in to promote student mobility and improve the comparability and competitiveness of European universities.

At the Bologna Process summit in Leuven/Louvain-La-Neuve in April 2009, European Higher Education Ministers set the challenging target that at least 20% of students graduating in the European Higher Education Area should have had a study or training period abroad by 2020. Within this hallmark countries pledge to make substantial efforts of encouraging students to go abroad in their educational policy. In fact, each country tries to effectively promote student mobility according to its own characteristics such as public education expenditure or foreign languages learning by student. The main objective of this work is to conduct an empirical analysis to explain some aspects of the differences between European Union member countries in the student mobility. In fact an econometric panel model is developed with the aim of explaining the relationship between student mobility and many economic and social factors.

Our data sets are provided by the Statistics Office of the European Communities (Eurostat).

Keywords:

European Higher Education Area, Panel data, student mobility.