ABSTRACT
Transition form plan to market brought massive lay offs and cut real wages and living standards for most of the people in Romania. High unemployment rates and lack of employment opportunities determined signifi cant fl ows of external migration. After the fi rst years of transition, emigration was slowly replaced by temporary migration abroad as a new form of external migration emerged: circulatory migration. Internal migration has remained rather low as it implies high costs and poor returns. During the last decade, as the Romanian economy started to grow, prices of real estate, including rentals, skyrocketed especially in several emerging urban areas. In the same time, wages displayed a moderate increase so that not many people could afford to migrate from rural to urban localities. Therefore, year by year, workers, with or without their families, temporary or even defi nitely, chose to move to more developed countries in order to increase standards of living for themselves and their families.
