Expatriation and permanent emigration intention among youth in Azerbaijan

. What are the major factors affecting Azerbaijani youth to boost their motivation for emigration? The research explores a complex interplay of possible factors that shape the temporary and permanent emigration intentions among Azerbaijani youth, using a survey of 1085 respondents aged 17 to 35 (47% males, 53% females). According to the study, youth’s emigration intention in Azerbaijan should be concerning, as more than half are willing to leave the country permanently. More and more young individuals dream of moving abroad since they attract to the allure of higher earnings, higher standards of living, and many other factors. Social and environmental factors, such as the quest for personal freedom, satisfaction from ecological conditions, marital status, family ties, and age factor are the strongest contributors to youth’s expatriate motivation . Besides, almost all life domains significantly influence the permanent emigration intentions of youth. To sum it up, this research sheds light on the considerations of Azerbaijani youth and provides insights into the factors that drive or hinder emigration. The study concludes that to prevent youth emigration, policymakers


INTRODUCTION
Migration has been one of the main human activities since the beginning of humanity.Thus, historically, factors such as seasons, weather conditions, and looking for better hunting grounds to nourish themselves were the main concerns of individuals and were primary factors that had both negative and positive impact on emigration.To illustrate, whereas lack of food sources might be a push factor to migrate, rich sources could be a pull factor as well.However, the factors that affect emigration are more complex in contemporary economies.Such factors as happiness and subjective well-being both induce individuals to migrate and negatively affect future migration intention, which De Jong (1999Jong ( , 2000) ) contemplated as the main determinants of migration.
Among others, Ivlevs (2015) has studied the effect of subjective well-being on emigration intention, underlining the fact that individuals' -subjective well-being influences their emigration intention.In general, utility-maximizing people prefer to migrate if they believe that the advantages of living abroad outweigh its drawbacks.Since, in the countries where they would be promoted, more social and happier, they would be more productive, which would have an optimistic impact on their living standards.Similarly, Ivlevs (2015) accentuated that in countries where less happy and less productive individuals live, productivity would diminish and decrease living standards, resulting in migration as well.Since this "vicious cycle" strengthens prospective "happiness drains" and relatively results in less productivity, it validates the significance of the investigation of individuals' emigration tendency (Ivlevs, 2015).
Although Ivlevs (2015) reveals happiness drain patterns in emigration, Aliyev et al. (2021) argue for the dominance of unhappy moves in the case of Azerbaijan.From this perspective, another problem arising due to emigration is brain drain.Nunn (2005) depicts the brain drain problem as a main barrier to economic growth, development and poverty reduction, especially in developing countries.Ganguli (2014) underlines potential problems that could arise as a result of brain drain.Firstly, this problem could result in the need for more mentors who educate future human capital.Secondly, they are valuable human resources that contribute to county's productivity.
According to Carling (2017), the mechanism that produces migration starts with prospects and conditions accompanied by life aspirations which create a desire to change and nudge migration aspirations.Although many fail to realize their aspirations to move, youth (Dalen and Henkens, 2008;Clark and Lisowski, 2017) and more educated people (Chiswick, 1999;van Dalen and Henkens, 2008) are more likely to be successful.In this respect, a study on emigration aspirations should yield a better understanding of the migration potential and its possible consequences.Particularly, it would be more informative to differentiate temporary (expatriation) and permanent emigration intentions.
This study employs the survey data (ASERC, 2021) to explore expatriation and permanent emigration intentions among Azerbaijani youth and evaluate the possible factors triggering the emigration aspirations.The youth is very important for Azerbaijan due to its role in capacity empowerment and modern economy building.What factors are associated with higher intentions to emigrate?We explore the role of demographic factors and satisfaction with life domains.

LITERATURE REVIEW
Migration happens for many reasons, ranging from security, demography, and human rights to poverty and climate change.For more than 30 years, the pull-push theory has been utilized to explain the causes of expatriation and repatriation (Glavac 2000;Gmelch 1980;Toren 1976).Although it is unlikely to determine the precise reason why each emigrant chooses to leave the country of origin and aspires to settle in a specific country, it is possible to outline the general push factors triggering the emigration process from different areas.According to Toren (1976), the factors that are negative and related to the shortcomings of the home country are push factors, whereas pull factors are positive and associated with the destination country.
Pull-push factors might be both economic (e.g.job opportunities), and noneconomic (e.g.family encouragement) motivated (Tharenou & Caulfield, 2010;Mishchuk & Grishnova, 2015).Higher-income, career development, working conditions, better quality of life, and better education environment are the main pull factors of the host country (Nga Ho et al., 2018;Khalid & Urbański, 2021).In general, utilitymaximizing people prefer to migrate if they believe that the advantages of living abroad outweigh its drawbacks (Ivlevs, 2015).
The existing situation and conditions in the home country can play a great role in forming the emigration intention of individuals and stimulating them to make certain changes.Yüksel et al., (2018) identified several fundamental push and pull factors which are economic, social, and political that may initiate the formation of individuals' emigration intentions.One key factor is income (Clemens, 2014;Kersan-Škabić & Blažević Burić, 2022) or perceived satisfaction with a household's financial conditions.The migration of skilled people is driven by the expected wage differential between the home and destination countries (Güngör & Tansel, 2008;Oliinyk et al., 2022).As Naudé (2010) points out, available career opportunities in a destination country may entice people and push them to emigrate to have better life conditions.As a result, the desire to move abroad rises in proportion to a decline in personal income (Clemens, 2014).
Feeling safe and the security factor is also one of the basic needs of people to be satisfied.Thus, political factors are important to take into consideration as a pull/push factor.For instance, authors such as Gugushvili (2011) and Hiskey, Montalvo and Orces (2014) pointed out a negative correlation between democracy level and intention to emigrate for Azerbaijan and 22 Latin American countries, respectively.Moreover, the emigration process is sometimes pushed by institutional weaknesses like corruption in developing nations as well (Aliyev et al., 2021).
From the viewpoint of Stark and Bloom (1985), emigration decisions are not solely individual decisions, and family, relatives and the size of networks will inevitably have an impact on that decision.Migrants may want to take care of their family members and relatives (spouses, children, parents, and other members) who are still in their country of origin (Van Dalen, Groenewold & Fokkema, 2005).Remittances may encourage people to consider emigrating because they convey to those left behind the idea of high income and a "happy life" abroad, as financial satisfaction is also one of the factors influencing migration intentions in addition to ties with family members (Van Dalen et al., 2005).
Regarding the demographic background of emigration aspirations, previous research reveals youth to have a higher likelihood (Dalen & Henkens, 2008;Clark & Lisowski, 2017).Simultaneously, factors like gender and marital status also matter.Numerous empirical studies have demonstrated that men and women generally have different motivations and intents for emigration.For instance, males have higher emigration intentions than female individuals in Morocco (Heering, van der Erf & van Wissen, 2004).Compared to men, women are more likely to be risk-averse in case of emigration, as women generally have a higher risk of assault, abuse, or human trafficking when they migrate independently as opposed to when they migrate with their families or to join their husbands (Fleury, 2016).For women, family networks are more important, as male migrants are more independent and autonomous (Heering et al., 2004).However, women who consider their financial situation as sufficient are less apt to want to have emigration intentions (Papapanagos and Sanfey, 2001).Having children in married couples can also have a variety of effects on preferences for further emigration, particularly on women's decisions (Ortensi and Belgiojoso, 2018).Thus, it can be assumed that the marital status of potential expats and emigrants can be considered as one of the components influencing the emigration intention.
Overall, the existing knowledge confirms the correlation of emigration intentions with life domains and demographic factors.However, there are a limited number of studies studying factors behind emigration intentions in Azerbaijan.A recent study by Aliyev et al. (2021) argues for "unhappy moves" contrary to Ivlevs (2015), revealing a greater intention to emigrate among youth, single males, and those with higher educational attainment.
According to the State Statistical Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan ( 2021), the main destination countries for Azerbaijani migrants are the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and European Union (EU) countries while a report (United Nations, 2020) displays increasing attractiveness of EU countries among Azerbaijanis.As young people make up a large portion of the population (Allahveranov et al. 2012), they also constitute the vast majority of Azerbaijani immigrants (Iunusov, 2003).When skilled people's emigration is considered, Azerbaijan's economic security can be at risk, according to Golovataya and Ascherova (2019).Despite of its utmost importance, the issue is not explored enough.
The current study will contribute to a better understanding of emigration aspirations in Azerbaijan in various ways.First of all, the study differentiates temporary (expatriation) and permanent emigration intention and particularly explores the role of life domains behind it.The second important distinction is only coverage of youth (age 17-35) which is not clearly represented in Aliyev et al. (2021).

Sampling
Current research aims to explore determinants of expatriation and permanent emigration intentions among youth (Aged 17-35) in Azerbaijan.However, the research excludes the students from analyses to avoid overestimation biasedness as the majority of students should desire to study abroad.Simultaneously, divorced people are not covered due to a limited number of respondents.Therefore, the sample space consists of youth excluding students and divorced people.
Within the cross-sectional data analysis framework, the research employs ASERC's (2021) survey data of 2208 respondents (49.5% males, 50.5% females).Methodologically, ASERC (2021) employed a self-select online survey tool, conducted between 09.09.2021-06.11.2021 online via social media (Facebook and Instagram) using paid ads targeting all Azerbaijani people aged over 17.Because of the large coverage and almost representative data structure across various categories, we can rely on the dataset to explore emigration intentions in Azerbaijan.We have extracted the group of interest -youth excluding students and divorced people, 1085 (47% males, 53% females).

Variables
The survey measures a respondent's emigration intention with two "yes/no" type questions.Firstly, an individual is asked to respond whether he/she would like to emigrate for a certain period (duration not explicitly mentioned) to measure the respondent's expatriation intention (EI).Accordingly, the next question asks whether the respondent would like to leave Azerbaijan permanently and settle in a foreign country that displays permanent emigration intention (PEI).Both questions transformed to a binary variable equals 1 if the answer is "Yes", and 0 if the answer is "No".
Among the potential determinants of both EI and PEI, the research takes into account the following indicators: AGE_GROUP categorizes the sample into "Age 17-25", and "Age 26-35".The variable gets 1 if a respondent belongs to the "Age 26-35" category, and 0 if the participant's age is within 17-25.
GENDER is a dummy variable equals 1 if a respondent is female and 0 otherwise.The survey measures gender on the basis of biological identity.
MARITAL_STATUS indicates whether the respondent is married or single.The data is categorized as unmarried (MARITAL_STATUS=0) and married (MARITAL_STATUS=1) EDUC represents a respondent's highest educational attainment level.According to Azerbaijan's current educational system, comprehensive school education (9-year) is compulsory.Tertiary education includes vocational schools, bachelor, master, and doctoral (PhD) degrees.To make it practically more informative, we categorize the education data as pre-bachelor (EDUC =0), bachelor (EDUC=1), and postbachelor (EDUC=2), in which pre-bachelor covers comprehensive school or vocational school graduates with no further education while master and PhD degree holders fall into the coverage of post-bachelor category.
LIVING_AREA displays whether a respondent is residing in the capital city (Baku, LIVING_AREA=2), surrounding region of Baku (Absheron-Khizi region, LIVING_AREA=1), or other regions of the country (LIVING_AREA=0).Note that Baku city and Absheron-Khizi region are industrial and heavily populated (including unofficial residents) areas compared to the remaining regions.
INCOME_CHANGE reports the subjective evaluation score by a respondent on his/her family's financial situation that how changed within the last 5 years (2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021).The question follows a positivist approach and asks how much the respondent agrees with the statement "In the last 5 years (2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021), the financial situation and living conditions of our family have changed for the better".Multiple choice options include totally disagree, disagree, slightly disagree, neutral, slightly agree, agree, and totally agree.The variable is coded from 1 (being totally disagree) to 7 (being totally agree), treated as a categoric variable in the analysis.
Satisfaction with life domains includes a set of variables representing a respondent's subjective satisfaction about his/her family (FamS), healthiness (HS), financial situation (FinS), close network (family and relatives, FRS), social network (schools, workplace, etc., SocS), feel of being secured (SecS), ecology (ES), and freedom (FrS).Self-reported satisfaction score with each life domain ranges from 1 to 10 on a 10-point Likert scale.The higher the score, the more satisfied with the corresponding life domain.
Life satisfaction (LS) is a single-item measure of a respondent's satisfaction with life while considering all things on a 10-point Likert scale.The higher the score, the more self-reported satisfaction with life.

Empirical methodology
The research employs Chi-Squared test to explore the dependence of both EI and PEI on aforementioned demographic indicators, satisfaction with life domains, and overall life satisfaction.Following Newbold et al. (2022), the test refers to a contingency table output (see table 1) to calculate the Chi-Squared score.
The null hypothesis is, that the variables are not dependent on each other.The decision rule is to Where,   denote the expected estimated observation value, calculated as: Here,   and   denote related row and column totals while  denotes the total of cells.  denotes the observation in the row  and the column .
Table 1 Contingency table with r rows and c columns In this research,  = 2 as both outcome variables (EI, and PEI) have only two categories, "Yes" or "No".On the contrary,  = 2 for AGE_GROUP and GENDER,  = 3 for EDUC, and LIVING_AREA,  = 7 for INCOME_CHANGE, and  = 10 for satisfaction with life domains and single-item measure of life satisfaction.

Descriptive statistics
Table 2 presents descriptive statistics of each variable.63% of respondents belong to the Age 26-35 group and the remaining are within 17-25 ages.The sample approximately represents the target group in terms of socio-demographic categories.Though the share of pre-bachelors is proportionally less than UNESCO's official statistics, we can do generalization with satisfactory accuracy as the number of respondents with pre-bachelor education is enough large.Meanwhile, geographical representativeness is also at an acceptable rate when unregistered inhabitants of Baku and Absheron regions are taken into consideration.Apparently, emigration intention among youth in Azerbaijan should be considered concerning.While 82% of respondents report temporary emigration intention, more than half are willing to leave permanently (see table 2).
As table 3 exhibits, expatriation intention always exceeds the share of permanent emigration intention.To elucidate, males are more open to the idea of migration, though severe distinction has not been observed through their responses.Analysis of age groups leads to argue that younger individuals report higher intention to migrate.While the majority of individuals with pre-bachelor degrees are positive about the expatriation idea, comparatively, they oppose the idea of migration rather than groups with bachelor and post-bachelor education which could be a sign of brain-drain possibilities.The difference related to location is not noticeable.As expected, unmarried respondents are more likely willing to emigrate than married ones.Beyond socio-demographic profile, satisfaction with life domains should provide valuable information about emigration intention among Azerbaijani youth, which also could allow to make applicable policy suggestions.Table 4 tabulates the satisfaction of respondents (sample average) for each life domain.Apparently, those who says "no" to the emigration intention-related questions are more satisfied with each life domain and their life satisfaction is higher than those who are willing to leave the country.From this perspective, satisfaction with life domains can be considered an important determinant of both expatriation and permanent emigration intention.However, regarding the question of whether satisfaction with life domains is significantly different between "No" and "Yes" groups, we should proceed with some empirical testing for a reliable inference.

Empirical results
As noted earlier, we employ Chi-Squared test to examine how different socio-demographic factors and satisfaction with life domains affect the emigration intention of Azerbaijani youth.Table 5 tabulates the test outcomes for both EI and.The results are fairly straightforward and yield practically valuable information.
Starting with temporary emigration intention (Expatriation), it becomes quite clear how significant the age group is.Results indicate strong causality from age group to expatriation intention ( < 0.01).In Table 2, the results also show that the 17-25 age group has more motivation to expatriate (86.47%) rather than individuals between the age of 26-35 (79.47%).However, the relationship between age group and permanent migration intentions (PEI) is statistically insignificant ( > 0.10).Gender does not significantly matter for expatriation ( > 0.10), while the difference in permanent emigration intention between males and females is significant ( < 0.05) supported by table 2. Around 57.2% of young males report their willingness to leave the country permanently while this proportion is 50.88% for females.The result is also consistent with Heering, van der Erf and van Wissen ( 2004) that gender is a significant factor in emigration intention.
According to table 5, respondents' marital status is an important determinant of expatriation ( < 0.01) and permanent emigration intentions ( < 0.05).Analyzing the data reveals that unmarried respondents are more ready and motivated to immigrate than married respondents.It is quite understandable, since it is difficult for people with family connections to emigrate, as underlined by Ortensi and Belgiojoso (2018) as well.Hence, 86.13% of unmarried respondents said they would live abroad for a certain period, compared to 76.86% of married respondents (see table 2).Regarding the permanent emigration intention, the proportion of the "Yes" group is 50.33% for married youth while it is 57.02% for unmarried individuals.
Young people's education level (pre-, bachelor's, and post-bachelor's) and their living area, which were divided into three subgroups (Baku, Absheron, Other regions) ( > 0.1), show no significant association with their intentions to emigrate.Thus, regardless of their level of education and where the respondent is residing, an individual's desire to emigrate is unaffected.
Beyond the factors mentioned earlier, the empirical findings also enable us to learn more about other determinants of intentions to emigrate among the country's employed people.The desire to live abroad permanently is found to be significantly positively impacted by income change (p<0.01).In comparison, there is almost no correlation between change in earnings and intentions to expatriate ( > 0.1).Therefore, change in earnings does not play any significant role for people who would like to stay abroad for a short period.
As we can observe, one of the presented life domains, financial satisfaction, exhibits results that are similar to estimates of changes in income.There is a strong causality from financial satisfaction ( < 0.01) to permanent emigration intentions of youth and no relationship with intentions to expatriate ( > 0.1).To put it simply, as table 4 also demonstrates, Azerbaijani youth who are financially stable and satisfied are less likely to choose to move abroad permanently and reside there.
Regarding the role of life domains, estimations clearly inform that each of them has a very strong impact on the permanent emigration intentions in Azerbaijan ( < 0.01).Whereas, the influence of these domains on expatriation intentions varies.Some life domains impact both types of emigration intentions.These include family satisfaction ( < 0.01), freedom satisfaction ( < 0.01), and ecological satisfaction ( < 0.01).These findings highlight the importance of family ties and how they affect young people's choices to immigrate to Azerbaijan.Estimations about another life domain -freedom satisfaction, provide insight into how important the feeling of personal freedom is to Azerbaijan's youth segment (rights to choose and make decisions about their own life).Ecological conditions of the country significantly matter for the country's youth and have a strong impact on the decisions to move to another country, which is observed in both types of emigration intentions.While comparing the mean estimations of these three life domains (table 4), it is quite clear that when the personal freedom of an individual is higher, ecological conditions are better, and satisfaction with family is strong emigration, emigration intentions of youth will diminish.
The life satisfaction variable takes into account all of the aforementioned satisfaction factors combined.It can be observed that in the long-term, which is represented by permanent emigration intentions, selfreported satisfaction with overall life conditions plays a significant role ( < 0.01).[This estimation can also be proved by Table 4, the average life satisfaction among youth who said "Yes" to permanent emigration is lower (Mean=5.84,St.dev= 2.27), than the mean of individuals who said "No" (Mean=6.78,St.dev= 2.10).]This analysis reveals that lower life satisfaction of young individuals will trigger the desire to emigrate upwards.However, life satisfaction has a comparatively less, but statistically significant impact on expatriation intention than it does on intention to migrate permanently ( < 0.05).

CONCLUSION
Emigration is a major concern of many countries including both migrant sending and migrant receiving states.A respondent's intention to emigrate reveals their readiness to move abroad.Nowadays, people around the world want to emigrate for a variety of causes and durations.Many scholars such as Glavac 2000;Gmelch 1980;Toren 1976 believe that the pull-push theory can help in a better understanding of the driving forces behind migratory intentions.In the case of Azerbaijan, the current research reveals that the primary causes of emigration are appropriate for push factors like satisfaction domains.The connection between a low level of satisfaction and a high level of willingness to leave is suitable for the opinions of Van Dalen and Henkens (2013).As a result, our research shows that young people's desire to emigrate will ultimately increase when their level of life happiness is low.Unhappiness in the home country can lead to losing young talents which can trigger the brain drain in the long-term.This result also confirms the opinion of Aliyev et al. (2021) such as there are "unhappy" moves among youth in Azerbaijan.
Actually, the majority of the researchers examined the causes of emigration intention in a common time horizon.They do not differentiate emigration according to time period.In this paper dividing emigration intention into two parts (temporary and permanent) gave better results in order to understand emigration intention.For instance, according to Aliyev et al. (2021) and Ivlevs (2015), emigration intention is greater among young people.However, the current study indicates that this approach is only suitable for the short-term and not for the long-term.Because willingness for permanent emigration is about 50-50 among the young generation.When we examine each satisfaction domain individually, we can see that permanent emigration intention is primarily influenced by satisfaction domains.This outcome is consistent with theories about factors influencing emigration intentions such as subjective well-being by Ivlevs (2015), perceived financial satisfaction by Clemens (2014), the influence of family, relatives, and the size of networks on the decision by Stark and Bloom (1985), Van Dalen et al. (2005).However, the importance of satisfaction over expatriation intention is not as much as over permanent migration intention.Health and financial satisfaction do not have any influence over expatriation intention.However, it ignores the approaches of Clemens (2014) and Van Dalen et al., (2005) about financial satisfaction for expatriation intention as they mentioned that income is one of the main factors of migration.
A recent study by Aliyev et al. (2021) argues for "unhappy moves" contrary to Ivlevs (2015), revealing a greater intention to emigrate among youth, single males, and higher educational attainment.Current research replicates the findings by Aliyev et al. (2021) for the youth in Azerbaijan.
The government should work with independent organizations, gather more data, and identify the key variables influencing how happy people are in their lives in society.According to the current study, there are various satisfaction factors (security, ecology, social etc.) that can shape policy recommendations.Actually, empirical data from this study allow us to provide a variety of recommendations: In order to improve financial satisfaction governments can create opportunities for entrepreneurship and support young individuals in starting their own businesses.To do this, they can establish programs that offer access to microfinance and small business loans for young entrepreneurs.Additionally, they can raise the minimum wage to increase financial satisfaction.For increasing family satisfaction governments can foster family-friendly workplaces with flexible work arrangements to promote work-life balance.For Close Network (Friends and Relatives) satisfaction, they can establish community programs, community centers, or programs that encourage social interaction and connection among young people.To increase health satisfaction they can increase medical research and do actions such as supporting hospitals and clinics, improving access to healthcare services and affordable medical facilities, promoting healthy lifestyles and providing resources for physical and mental well-being, such as fitness programs and counseling services.For security satisfaction governments can strengthen public safety measures and ensure a secure environment, implementing policies that protect young individuals from discrimination, violence, and exploitation.For social network satisfaction, governments can enhance the quality of education by investing in educational resources, infrastructure, and teacher training.For freedom satisfaction governments can encourage young people to actively participate in civic and community activities.Providing platforms for them to voice their opinions, contribute to decision-making processes, and engage in community development initiatives.For ecological satisfaction, they can implement policies that encourage sustainable activities, carbon emission reduction, and conservation measures and support initiatives that promote renewable energy, green technology, and sustainable practices.
Unfortunately, the main drawback of the current study is that the analyses do not include the students.Actually, students are the main part of the youth and most of the students would like to study abroad for either short-term or long-term.Thus, analyses in future studies should also involve students.

Table 2
Descriptive statistics of variables

Table 3
Emigration intention by disaggregated groups

Table 4
Satisfaction with life domains (sample average) and emigration intention Standard deviations are in parenthesizes.Source: Authors' own completion