International mobility: expatriation today

1. The reasons for choosing expatriation
“SMEs and major groups have two main reasons for choosing staff mobility: i) transferring skills (or making up for a lack of them); ii) exercising control from the head office.
However, I have slight reservations about the phrase “exercising control from the head office.” It is more a question of carrying out sensitive functions that require perfect knowledge of the way the company works, of its culture and its methods. It can also be a case of ensuring the confidentiality of certain information.”

2. From “expatriation” to “international mobility”
“The term “expatriation” is not always entirely suitable. For the general public, it covers French people who go to live abroad. Today, the specialists prefer to speak of “international mobility”.
More and more often, companies have to transfer employees of different nationalities to different countries, through recruitment campaigns that do not necessarily take place in the expatriate’s country of origin. The example of the Belgian company that recruits a German to be sent to work in its subsidiary in Singapore is frequent today. In addition, the career paths of mobile personnel are changing, particularly for young people. And in my view this trend will be accentuated in the future.
The traditional case of executives who go abroad for three years to gain experience in international markets before returning to their original company, is also changing. We are already seeing, and we will be seeing more and more, the case of young people who are sent to a foreign country by a company and then stay in the country in question. They go on to work for another company, which may then send them to yet another country and so on. This is why I think that the concept of “international mobility” is more appropriate.”

3. Host countries
“The most popular are European countries. Germany, Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom and Switzerland each have between 120,000 and 200,000 French expatriates. The United States and Canada are also States where there are large numbers of expatriates (150,000 to 300,000).
As for countries with rapidly developing economies, particularly China and India that everybody is talking about, we can note that there are indeed more expatriates there than there were previously. But these countries are still very far behind the figures given above, with scarcely more than 10,000 to 15,000 French people living there.”

4. Commuting
“This practice is developing rapidly in Europe. In fact, can we still say, for instance, that engineers who leave Bordeaux or Paris every Monday morning to go to work in Brussels or Barcelona are expatriates? They are European citizens and our institutions still have a lot of work to do in this respect to make administrative procedures smoother (social welfare, pensions, etc.).”

5. “Impatriation”
“This is also very popular at the moment. This is firstly due to the fact that, by setting up our French firms in so-called “relocation” countries, we have a far greater need for exchanges of knowledge, practices and technologies. This means that a growing number of staff are present in France. Also recent measures (especially tax incentives) in favour of “impatriates”, tend to increase France’s attractiveness, thereby increasing their presence in France.”

6. Secondment or expatriation
“The only distinction between an expatriate and a secondee is that the latter continues to benefit from the French social security system. However, a company cannot simply decide on secondment status on its own, particularly when it comes to employees who come to France from countries where social contributions are “advantageous”. Secondment is governed by very strict rules, such as the fact that there is a real need for the employees due to their specific skills, that they have a non-hierarchical role, etc. For social protection, this means that at GMC we propose additional cover to top up the basic system, in the same way as we do for the expatriates insured by the Caisse des Français à l’Etranger (CFE, social security fund for French nationals abroad). There are therefore two types of cover available for mobile employees: cover from the first euro paid and additional cover to the social security system (for secondees) or the CFE system (expatriates).”

7. The future of expatriation
“Without venturing into definite predictions, we can say that the future depends above all on the world economic situation and the development of international trade, which will not slow down in the coming year. At the same time, the levels of training in the countries where companies are setting up could play in favour of local recruitments. As for social welfare schemes, needs will continue to grow, meaning that we will continue to play a key role. But welfare system managers will need to change, probably by offering more services and new guarantees. This is why an organisation like GMC Services is constantly investing in new resources in terms of people, networks and management systems.”