Policy Brief: Mobility Corridors in Southeast Europe

Cross-border labour mobility in Southeast Europe concentrates along four corridors: the Adriatic-Ionian arc, the Pan-European Corridor X, the Black-Sea-to-Aegean route, and the western Balkans–Central Europe spine through Hungary. These corridors carry the bulk of the region's regular cross-border labour movement and a substantial share of its seasonal and informal flows.

The corridors are infrastructurally uneven. Two of the four have benefited from sustained EU-financed upgrades in the past decade; the other two remain bottlenecked at specific known crossings. The brief documents the bottlenecks and notes that, in three of the four cases, the binding constraint is not physical infrastructure but border-procedure throughput.

Mobility corridors are a useful diagnostic because they reveal where bilateral cooperation is operationally working and where it is performative. The brief argues that throughput data — collected by border agencies and rarely published — would be the cheapest single transparency intervention available in the region.