International retirement migration: coping with concepts and measures

Vicente Rodriguez, Instituto de Economía y Geografía, Spain

International retirement migration (IRM) in Europe is already reaching a common consensus about its difficulty of being conceptualised and measured. As a migration/mobility phenomenon being affected for recent contexts, IRM is over the desk to be conceptualised according classical migration analysis and some new other social paradigms in relation to mobile lifestyles, trans-national behaviours and patterns, dual place attachments, communities formation, social and civil rights recognitions, etc. Through references and secondary and primary data, this paper will discuss about the concepts usually taken into consideration when analysing the migration or mobile forms in which elderly retired are implied in Europe, the factors leading to different and variegated types of retired movers, the names to describe IRM situations. Finally, a reflection about the difficulties official data producers find when measuring these migration/mobile types will be carried out to analyse the common problems found by researchers for data usefulness.