Authors: Mathias Czaika & Jiancheng Gu -University for Continuing Education Krems
The piece looks at why return and readmission policies, although central to EU migration governance, work so unevenly in practice. Even with a shared legal framework, some countries manage to return people efficiently while others run into diplomatic standoffs or simple non-cooperation. The authors argue that this isn’t just about administrative muscle. It’s about politics, incentives and the way both EU+ states and countries of origin strategically respond to each other.
So they build a game-theoretic model where EU+ governments decide how much effort to invest in enforcement and third countries decide how willing they are to take people back. Costs, benefits, reciprocity and political alignment all shape those choices. Then they test this with a mix of panel and cross-sectional data, trying to untangle what actually drives return outcomes. Along the way they point out big measurement problems in current return statistics and sketch how better data and targeted incentives could make cooperation more workable.
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