Migrant Entrepreneurs as Drivers of Wage and Labour Standards: Transnational Normative and Structural Embeddedness for Promoting Development in Kosovo

Abstract

Migrant and diaspora entrepreneurs who create economic links between origin and immigration countries are increasingly seen as development actors. However, it remains unclear to what extent they improve working standards in their countries of origin and what motives and conditions shape their actions. Using a combined analytical frame—transnational normative and structural embeddedness—this article critically examines wage and labour norms promoted by migrant entrepreneurs and relates them to the opportunities and constraints they face when bridging markets across borders. Drawing on around 50 qualitative interviews with migrant entrepreneurs and stakeholders in Kosovo, particularly in the ICT sector, I argue that migrant entrepreneurs connecting to international markets often foster higher wages, social security and workforce training in the country of origin. Yet, these shifts result not only from transferred norms and values experienced in immigration countries but also from national and international market pressures. Despite a 40% increase in entry-level wages in some firms, businesses struggle to retain workers amid local competition and ongoing emigration to the European Union, where social protections are stronger. As a response, entrepreneurs increasingly call on the Kosovar state to strengthen social security systems and improve educational standards and to anchor their development efforts more firmly in institutional structures.

Introduction

Since the 1990s, migrants have been regarded as promising development actors in their home countries—not only for the financial remittances they send but also for the social remittances they transmit (Levitt, 1998; Pries, 2023). Since the 2000s, particular attention has been given to migrants who establish businesses and act as entrepreneurs in their countries of origin (Silva et al., 2025). Especially when operating transnationally, they are expected to foster development by connecting local markets to those abroad, creating jobs, boosting exports and introducing innovation (Naudé et al., 2017; Portes et al., 2002). However, it remains unclear whether migrant entrepreneurs contribute to improving labour standards in their countries of origin and how norm transfers, local and international labour market conditions, and institutional frameworks influence these contributions (Delgado Wise et al., 2013; Naudé et al., 2017).

This article examines the case of migrant and diaspora entrepreneurs in Kosovo, focusing especially on the information and communication technology sector (ICT), which is strongly linked to international markets. Based on social anthropological fieldwork I conducted in Prishtina between 2022 and 2024—including around 50 qualitative interviews with migrant entrepreneurs and stakeholders—I explore the opportunities and constraints these entrepreneurs face in bridging markets across borders. Specifically, I investigate how migrant entrepreneurs engage in developing labour standards, wages, social security provisions and employee training in Kosovo. These are areas they themselves emphasised as crucial for the well-being and future prospects of their employees. I also discuss whether improved working conditions emerge primarily from progressive ideals or as necessary strategies for recruitment and retention, considering local realities and transnational dependencies. My analysis combines theories of social, also called intangible, remittances (Levitt, 1998; Pinkow-Läpple & Möllers, 2022; Pries, 2023) with theories on the mixed embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurship, which have been developed for the context of immigration (Ram et al., 2017), the country of origin (Duan et al., 2021) as well as in their entangled dual embeddedness in two countries (Yamamura & Lassalle, 2022). With this combined approach, I aim to examine the transnational normative and structural embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurship in Kosovo.

As will be shown, migrant entrepreneurs—especially in the ICT sector—often offer higher wages and better working conditions as well as better training than is average in Kosovo. This is partly due to the personal experience that entrepreneurs have gained abroad, which they want to transfer to Kosovo, as well as to their integration into global value chains and increasingly competitive local labour markets. Some standards are being introduced to maintain international business relationships, either because they are formally required or to better serve international customers and build a good reputation. At the same time, increasing competition for skilled workers in Kosovo and ongoing migration are driving entrepreneurs to introduce higher wages, better working standards and further training for employees. However, the introduction of higher wage and labour standards and the training of workers is also becoming increasingly challenging for employers, prompting them to demand more government support in the areas of education and social security. This dynamic illustrates both the transformative potential and the limit of the contribution of migrant entrepreneurs to development.

The article proceeds by outlining the migration histories and investment context of migrant entrepreneurs in Kosovo, before introducing the theoretical lens and methodological approach. The empirical findings are then presented in three parts: job and wage development, labour and social security standards, and training and human capital. Finally, I discuss the opportunities and limitations of migrant entrepreneurs as ‘multi-developers’, reflecting on their embeddedness in both local and international structures and the ongoing out-migration from Kosovo.

Migration Histories and Investment Context of Migrant Entrepreneurs in Kosovo

Kosovo, the youngest of the Yugoslav successor states, which declared independence from Serbia in 2008, is an interesting case for studying transnational migrant entrepreneurship. The country has experienced multiple migration waves: labour migration to Western Europe since the 1960s, large-scale displacement and flight migration during the violent conflict and war in the 1990s, family reunification and intensified labour migration especially since 2016 with the Western Balkans Agreement between Germany. Today, over 30% of Kosovo’s population lives abroad (Krasniqi, 2022) and the desire to emigrate remains unbroken. With the number of migrants, the volume of financial remittances has also increased and is estimated to account for 17.5% of GDP in 2023 (World Bank Group, 2024). While financial remittances alleviate poverty and fuel construction and consumption (Arapi-Gjini et al., 2020; Government Authority on Migration, 2019; Krasniqi, 2022; Leutloff-Grandits, 2023), they also risk hampering local production capacities (Möllers & Arapi-Gjini, 2024). While Kosovo has been marked by high unemployment numbers in the first decade after the war, ongoing emigration combined with a sharply declining birth rate transformed it into a country with labour shortages in crucial sectors such as healthcare, construction, agriculture and services.

To counteract these effects and prevent further emigration, the Kosovar government, organisations focused on the diaspora (e.g., Germin) and international actors (e.g., Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Caritas Switzerland) and various transnational business associations such as the Albanian-German Business Association and the German–Kosovar Chamber of Commerce are pursuing programmes that strengthen the ties of emigrated Kosovars to their home countries and, in particular, promote their entrepreneurial ambitions (Germin, 2023). It is assumed that migrants who set up businesses in their countries of origin create a ‘triple win-win’ that benefits the country of origin, the country of immigration and the migrants themselves (Bell & Does, 2008; Dauvergne & Marsden, 2014; Djelti & Zapata-Barrero, 2024). This applies also to migrants from the Western Balkans, including Kosovo, who are expected to contribute to the socio-economic development in their countries of origin with their investments and the transfer of knowledge and skills (Qaisran, 2023).

Migrant entrepreneurs in Kosovo include both first-generation migrants who migrated as adults and second-generation diaspora members who migrated as children or were born abroad and grew up in a migration context. They have either ‘returned’ to Kosovo, and are thus also referred to as returnee entrepreneurs, or they maintain residences across countries, then often called diaspora or transnational migrant entrepreneurs. They strategically exploit asymmetries between Kosovo and the European Union: some target local gaps by introducing products and services common abroad but are lacking in Kosovo, while others, especially in the ICT sector, serve EU markets through outsourcing and nearshoring, leveraging low non-wage labour costs (Milek, 2022). One entrepreneur noted Kosovo’s competitive tax system and minimal social security contributions as key advantages:

Kosovo has … the most attractive tax system in Europe from a corporate tax perspective, because social security contributions are the lowest in Kosovo compared to the Balkans. I don’t want to refer to Europe or Germany, where you have to pay 40 or 50 per cent of your gross income. As an employer in Kosovo, you have to pay another 5 per cent on top of your gross salary, which is nothing. You have a 10 per cent flat tax, corporate income tax, you don’t get that anywhere in Europe, not even in the Balkans.

Many migrant entrepreneurs see themselves, however, not only as capitalist business persons, but they regard their economic engagement in Kosovo as a way to ‘find meaning in life’ and contribute to Kosovo’s development. Their visions are shaped by long-standing Western developmental paradigms portraying the Balkans as needing to ‘catch up’ (Todorova, 1997) and by EU practices of exporting rules and regulations to align markets as part of the EU association processes (Obad, 2008). Accordingly, they emphasise investing in local infrastructure, using local services and most of all creating quality jobs with better wages and better working conditions, which adds an intangible dimension to their business project.

From ‘Migration–Development Optimism’ to Transnational Entrepreneurship

Early debates on the nexus of migration and development were often binary, reaching from optimistic to pessimistic views (Faist, 2008, p. 25). The optimistic approach, shaped by modernisation theory, assumed that the social inequalities of global capitalism would even out in the long term, as migrants would support their families in their home countries through remittances and boost the economy until migration was no longer necessary (Djelti & Zapata-Barrero, 2024). The pessimistic strand argued that migration would foster social inequalities and dependencies between countries, particularly between the Global North and the Global South, among others because of the ‘brain drain’, that is the emigration of educated people in particular and thus the loss of cultural capital for the societies of origin (Faist, 2008, pp. 22, 25–26).

Since the 1990s, the focus has shifted increasingly to migrants as actors of development. This approach highlights not only their financial remittances to their home societies but also their social and cultural remittances (Levitt, 1998; Pries, 2023)—also referred to as intangible remittances (Pinkow-Läpple & Möllers 2022)—and the connections they create between their home and host countries. In particular, the ability of migrants to act by setting up transnational companies is being analysed. Migrant entrepreneurs are no longer seen as filling ethnic niches in the host country, but as multilocalised economic actors that utilise institutional differences across borders, but also broker between them, thereby contributing to the development of the economies of two or more countries (Portes et al., 2002). Migrants who start and run businesses in their home countries are often seen as pioneers of these development processes (Faist, 2008, pp. 29–30; Mitrović, 2017; Sejdini, 2013).

The concept of mixed embeddedness (Kloosterman & Rath, 2001) highlights the specific socio-economic and political–institutional context in the immigration country in which migrants operate as entrepreneurs, such as the regulations and political framework conditions that migrants encounter when starting and running their businesses, but also the social networks that migrants draw on, which can promote or hinder migrant entrepreneurship in immigrant societies. Recently, this concept has been extended to transnationally active migrant entrepreneurs, examining the effects of social, political and economic dimensions in the country of origin (Duan et al., 2021) as well as in two countries (Yamamura & Lassalle, 2022). It has been argued that migrant entrepreneurs who link two or more countries for their transnational business activities operate at the intersection of market niches, regulatory institutions and opportunity structures that span national borders. This finding is crucial for Kosovo, as a migrant entrepreneur may, for example, hold residence rights in Germany, set up a company in Kosovo and hire employees in Prishtina to serve customers in Germany. The transnational perspective helps explain why migrant entrepreneurs who operate transnationally may adopt EU labour standards for their businesses in a non-EU country such as Kosovo, even if this is not required by law.

While the concept of mixed embeddedness focuses on the market and political context in which migrants operate as entrepreneurs (Kloosterman & Rath, 2001) and is to be applied here to the transnational context of the country of origin and country of immigration, the concept of social remittances (Levitt, 1998; Pries, 2023) shows how migrants consciously or unconsciously transfer ideas, norms and practices acquired abroad to the society of their country of origin. Pinkow-Läpple and Möllers (2022) have further developed the concept of social remittances—which they call intangible remittances—by linking it to the economic sphere, among other things. In the context of entrepreneurship, combining the concepts of mixed embeddedness and social—or intangible—remittances allows us to link the transfer of work norms such as wage-setting norms, occupational safety routines and vocational training to firm performance and labour market conditions in socio-economic and legal contexts in which migrant entrepreneurs operate across national borders. Elo et al. (2018) also highlight deliberate firm-level considerations and emphasise the strategic selectivity inherent in such transfers: migrant entrepreneurs adopt only those institutional templates that bring a competitive advantage or moral legitimacy for their businesses.

A growing number of research studies are examining the link between transnational entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility (CSR), that is, the voluntary contribution of businesses to sustainable development that goes beyond legal requirements. The results of this research are diverse and show that there is more to it than simply being a migrant entrepreneur: Graham (2014) finds that companies in Georgia run by diaspora entrepreneurs are not necessarily more socially responsible or more committed to the development of their employees than other foreign investors, even if they would be uniquely positioned to do so. Li et al. (2024) found that highly skilled Chinese returnee entrepreneurs are more committed to CSR once their companies are established in foreign markets. This literature suggests that improving labour standards is not a phenomenon observed in all migrant enterprises, but depends on the benefits to the enterprises (see also Ram et al., 2017).

Synthesising the above, this article will examine how migrant entrepreneurs introduce higher wages and better working and social standards, and provide vocational training standards, and how these are embedded in normative as well as national and international frames. To this end, I will use a composite analytical approach that I refer to as transnational normative and structural embeddedness. This combines the structural findings of ‘mixed embeddedness’ with the perspective of norm transfer from research on social transfers and focuses on capacity to act under structural constraints. I argue that migrant and diaspora entrepreneurs in the ICT sector in Kosovo are introducing new wage and labour standards drawing on their experiences abroad and thus on a normative transnational embedding. However, this also depends on international structural embedding, such as integration into global value chains, which shape their ability—and willingness—to raise labour standards in Kosovo. This is also linked to national structural embedding—the competition for the best talent on the local labour market in Kosovo, but also on the international labour market and migration regimes, as workers can increasingly choose whether or not to migrate to Western European countries, which offer better salaries and higher social security standards. As a result, migrant and diaspora entrepreneurs active in the ICT sector in Kosovo offer good salaries and working conditions to attract staff, but they struggle to compensate for Kosovo’s weak public social security system and have to contend with rising education costs, prompting them to ask the state for help.

Methods

This study draws on a qualitative sample of 25 companies founded and managed by Kosovo Albanians with first-hand migration experience, most of whom maintain business links to EU markets and operate transnationally. The companies, primarily based in Prishtina, Kosovo’s capital, span sectors including trade, manufacturing and services, with a particular focus on the ICT and business process outsourcing sectors serving EU and Swiss clients.

Initial sampling followed a snowball strategy, whereby I was introduced to firms through key actors such as business associations, diaspora support institutions and private contacts. This approach enabled access to diverse entrepreneurial perspectives. However, I deliberately focused on the ICT sector because of its high growth potential, its critical role in linking Kosovo to global value chains, the high salaries above Kosovo’s average and its strong exposure to international labour standards—factors central to understanding transnational normative and structural embeddedness.

Company sizes in the sample ranged from a few employees to 1,500. The firms were led by both first-generation migrants (emigrated as adults during or after the 1990s conflict and war, often with precarious legal statuses in Germany, Switzerland or Austria, where they were restricted to work in the blue-collar sector) and second-generation migrants (born or raised abroad, typically with university education). This article emphasises the ICT entrepreneurs belonging to the second-generation migrants, who combine international education with local familiarity, making them key actors for studying norm transfer dynamics and structural embeddedness of these enterprises in the Kosovo as well as international markets.

Interviews with entrepreneurs lasted from 1 to 3 hours and were semi-structured, allowing respondents to foreground issues they found most important, such as wage policies, social security and training, as well as the national and international embeddedness of their entrepreneurial activities. Additionally, I conducted a few interviews with employees and about 20 expert interviews with representatives from business associations, ministries and international organisations supporting migrant entrepreneurship and development. The expert interviews helped contextualise firm practices within broader policy and institutional frameworks and in the national and international labour market. Finally, I consulted think tank and media reports as well as digital company self-presentations and podcasts to triangulate findings. All interviews were conducted with informed consent and anonymised.

Creating Jobs and Developing Salaries

Since unemployment is often viewed as a main driver of migration, job creation has long been considered the central development contribution of migrants who start businesses in their home countries. This was also the case in Kosovo, especially from 1999 onwards, when NATO intervention ended the war and new state structures emerged. During this period, many migrants and diaspora entrepreneurs returned to support family members and provide urgently needed employment opportunities (Krasniqi & Williams, 2019; Williams et al., 2023). With high unemployment rates—particularly among youth (Government Authority on Migration, 2019)—and very restrictive migration regulations until 2016, any form of job creation appeared beneficial (Jusufi & Ukaj, 2020). However, weak job formalisation and an oversupply of labour led to very low labour costs and frequent worker exploitation. As one expert from the Kosovar-German Business Union noted:

What the employees or the working class have broken here in Kosovo, I think there are many entrepreneurs who had [no regulated working hours]. They just started in the sun in the morning and stopped at some point where you couldn’t see anymore. Firstly, secondly, they didn’t pay any, not even pension insurance.

Such conditions reinforced the desire of the population of Kosovo to emigrate in search of better opportunities, which has been increasingly realised since 2016 with the Western Balkans Agreement with Germany.

In recent years, wages in Kosovo have risen across sectors, not only due to entrepreneurs’ altruistic motives or the transfer of Western wage ideals but also as a response to changing labour market dynamics. The official unemployment rate fell from 22.8% in 2019 to 10.7% in 2024 (Statistika Kosovo, 2025), with actual figures likely even lower due to a large informal sector (European Training Foundation, 2024, p. 6). Today, certain sectors, particularly healthcare (Balkans Policy Research Group, 2022), but also agriculture, construction, manufacturing and ICT, face labour shortages. While many Kosovars have already emigrated, others, supported by remittances, avoid local low-wage jobs and await opportunities to move abroad, where they expect much higher wages and better working conditions (Ibrahimi, 2023; Zeqiri, 2024; Zhushi & Qehaja, 2024). This leads to labour shortages and sudden staff losses, resulting in competition for workers.

To counteract the labour shortage, some entrepreneurs in manual sectors attempt to import workers from the Global South, especially from Bangladesh, where around 700 work visas were issued by January 2024 (Zeqiri, 2024). Others invest in automating production and services, including AI-based systems, which both fosters innovation and reduces local labour demand (see also Staritz, 2012). However, most entrepreneurs respond by enhancing working conditions—offering free meals and transport, or shifting to a 5-day working week instead of a 6-day working week, which is still not uncommon in some production processes—and raising wages to retain staff.

In the ICT sector, especially in firms serving German-speaking markets, wages are markedly higher than Kosovo’s 2023 average of €570 (Zeqiri, 2024), with starting wages in call centres around €800 and potential earnings up to €2,000, which is more than three times the average in Kosovo, with wages increasingly performance-related. In Germany, instead, average gross wages in call centre jobs are with €2,500 significantly below the national average wage of €4,634 gross in 2024 (Destatis, n.d.). Given the high non-wage labour costs in Germany and the low non-wage labour costs in Kosovo, it can be assumed that net wages in Germany and Kosovo will therefore converge. At the same time, the different non-wage labour costs in Kosovo and Germany allow entrepreneurs who set up call centres in Kosovo for German customers to continue to enjoy a certain profit margin, even when net wages in Germany and Kosovo are almost equal.

Given the high salaries in the ICT sector, entrepreneurs with a migrant background working in this sector see themselves as attractive employers who can offer their employees in Kosovo a standard of living on a par with or even higher than that in Western Europe, especially as they benefit from the lower cost of living. One migrant entrepreneur of a call centre said:

And the sectors in which we operate are precisely the sectors that have the potential to reduce the economic gap in income to the target market that young people have in mind to such an extent that from an economic perspective there is no longer any incentive to go to Germany.

The recent wage increases partly reflect the integration of local companies into global value chains (GVCs), supporting the view that participation in GVCs can lead to higher wages and broader employment benefits—especially when higher standards, whether formalised or voluntary, lead to better positioning with international customers (Hollweg, 2019, p. 63; Ravenhill, 2014; Staritz, 2012). However, the dynamics of the local labour market also play a decisive role: with the increasing spread of ICT companies, German-speaking employees became scarce, leading to competition and wage increases.

The visa liberalisation at the beginning of 2024 and the doubling of the annual quota under the Western Balkans Agreement from 25,000 to 50,000 workers who are allowed to come to Germany in addition to skilled labour migration have further improved mobility opportunities for Kosovar workers who are dissatisfied with conditions on the Kosovar labour market. As such, there is also a critical linkage between the local and the international labour market: According to one internal ICT company survey, about 50% of staff planned to emigrate within 1–2 years if they received the opportunity. An entrepreneur of another large ICT business stated that the average length of time employees stay with his company is about 2 years. Instead of using secure long-term job prospects—emphasised by entrepreneurs as pathways to build a good future in Kosovo, such as taking out a loan to buy or build a home—many workers preferred local job-hopping for better pay or migrating when opportunities arose. Despite raising wages and shrinking profit margins, entrepreneurs are thus confronted with a high turnover of staff. Employee interviews confirm this trend, revealing moves to improve salaries or due to declining satisfaction with monotonous, high-pressure tasks aimed at European markets, echoing outsourcing dynamics elsewhere (Flecker & Meil, 2010, p. 680). As one entrepreneur observed, high psychological burdens contributed to recruitment challenges in Western call centres, leading to relocations to Kosovo, where workers accepted such jobs, albeit often as temporary steps towards emigration. Thus, even with improved job security, many employees see their roles as transitory, not aligning with long-term visions of staying in Kosovo.

Developing Labour and Social Security Standards

Several migrant entrepreneurs described how the social security benefits they offered went far beyond state-mandated provisions and average practices in Kosovo, which remain minimal, especially since the post-war period of state-building that followed a neoliberal trajectory (Leutloff-Grandits, 2023). One entrepreneur who launched an online sales platform in 2019 highlighted widespread private sector realities:

Either they didn’t have contracts or if they did, the holidays weren’t respected. So you had to work either way and you didn’t get paid for overtime or for the holidays that they worked. (see Tea with Alsa, 2023)

The entrepreneur explained that that such conditions of disrespect led workers to quit from one day to the other and emphasised the importance of binding rules and more equitable working conditions to foster mutual security:

And I think that when they feel that it is mutual, so they will respect the workplace better and the job to the best of their abilities, knowing that you’re trying to provide everything necessary for them to feel like their job is, um, as it should be. (see Tea with Alsa, 2023)

Many migrant entrepreneurs positioned themselves against the widespread absence of social security provision, intentionally introducing practices and values they internalised in Western European contexts. A core example is health insurance, which is voluntary in Kosovo, covering only a part of the population (Paçarizi, 2024). Migrant entrepreneurs often co-financed these schemes, sometimes having to encourage or ‘educate’ employees to participate since workers share the cost burden. Other entrepreneurs reported paying for sick leave—a formal legal requirement but often disregarded in Kosovo’s private and informal sectors.

One call centre entrepreneur even introduced paternity leave, moving beyond Kosovo’s norm of maternity-only leave (Davalos et al., 2015). Such initiatives not only demonstrate value transfer but also serve as indirect tools against gender discrimination, given that private sector employers might otherwise avoid hiring women due to maternity leave costs. These measures embody what migrant entrepreneurs described as ‘normal standards’ from their experiences abroad. As one entrepreneur educated in Norway put it:

So, for example, I don’t really like how some people run their businesses. I don’t like how they treat their employees for example. I in my company, … we have, what I like to say, Norwegian standards. So everything from meetings with our employees to their contract, to their vacation, to their pay, to overtime, everything is as it is in Norway. And I really wanted to create something different, even if it’s not on a big scale, at least within our company.

For many, these efforts are, however, not purely altruistic but also instrumental in making jobs more attractive and retaining staff. Entrepreneurs frequently noted that employees were less motivated to migrate solely for higher salaries but sought more robust social security systems found in Western Europe. By providing benefits locally, migrant entrepreneurs try to bridge this gap and simultaneously set new benchmarks in Kosovo, encouraging other employers to follow. One entrepreneur emphasised this competitive and normative dimension:

I would definitely say so because at the end of the day, for example, if we take that paternity leave thing … we use it as a marketing instrument and that is a wakeup call also to other economic actors. And they would say, Ah, (this firm) did that. So, we probably, we need to live up to this new standard … This will create pressure on every other actor. And of course, this will make a society and a country economic environment more progressive and more competitive.

However, these individual efforts also reveal clear limits. Migrant entrepreneurs acknowledged that they could not fully compensate for Kosovo’s underdeveloped public social security system, nor could they elevate it to levels seen in Germany, Switzerland or Austria—the main destinations for Kosovar migrants. They underscored the need for state intervention and broader institutional reform. Yet, Kosovo’s low taxes and minimal non-wage labour costs—features that attract foreign outsourcing and underpin migrant entrepreneurs’ profitability—simultaneously constrain the state’s fiscal capacity to expand social protections. This tension also highlights the dual embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurs: while normatively motivated to introduce higher standards from abroad, they remain structurally constrained by national economic frameworks and global market logics. It also highlights the intertwined asymmetries, distinguishing between countries with high tax burdens and strong public social security systems and those with low tax burdens—from which migrant companies benefitted—and weak public social security systems.

Training and Human Capital Development

Across the diverse sectors where migrant entrepreneurs operate in Kosovo, the local workforce is often not sufficiently prepared for the specific demands of international markets (Ziberi et al., 2021). In the ICT sector, migrant entrepreneurs highlighted a shortage of knowledgeable and experienced workers and criticised university curricula as outdated. In response, larger ICT firms have developed their own recruitment strategies, such as establishing ‘talent schools’ to identify promising candidates, train them and hire the best. However, such initiatives entail significant costs and reflect entrepreneurs’ frustration with the misalignment between public education and market needs.

This situation illustrates a core aspect of entangled dual structural embeddedness: despite migrant entrepreneurs’ transnational ambitions and external standards, they remain constrained by local educational infrastructures and state capacities. Consequently, migrant entrepreneurs are actively lobbying the Kosovo government to update school and university curricula, aiming to forge alliances between the education system and the ICT sector. Their goal is to secure a more qualified future workforce and to enhance Kosovo’s attractiveness for the international ICT market.

In the call centre sector, serving primarily clients in German-speaking countries, language skills represent a crucial bottleneck. While Kosovo has a notable number of German speakers—a legacy of long-standing migration to German-speaking countries—demand still exceeds supply. Many parents invest in private German courses for their children when they can afford it, and some young people learn the language informally through television. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to find enough workers with the necessary level of German proficiency and market-oriented communication skills, particularly as the number of call centres has expanded.

To address this, call centres have offered free language training programmes ranging from a few months to a year. However, employers have recently reduced their willingness to provide such training. Rising costs, intensifying domestic competition and the ease of emigration to German-speaking countries have made it difficult for companies to retain employees they have trained. These dynamics highlight a tension between normative commitments to worker development and the structural realities of labour market fluidity and global mobility.

Employees, on the other hand, benefit from these training opportunities. They acquire valuable skills that increase their human capital and enhance their bargaining power, enabling them to negotiate higher wages or secure positions abroad. This reinforces a self-reinforcing cycle: employers must offer better conditions to compete for workers, even as those same workers use their new leverage to consider alternative options.

In short, job creation and wage increase hinge on the availability of skilled labour, creating a complex interplay between private sector initiatives, education policy and labour migration dynamics. In this context, migrant entrepreneurs—alongside local and international actors—have formed alliances to advocate for more robust public language education, ranging from introducing German as a compulsory subject in primary schools to reforming higher education curricula. While such efforts could ease the immediate training burden on firms, they also reinforce Kosovo’s orientation towards German-speaking labour markets. This could strengthen integration into international value chains, which in turn could lead to an improvement in wage and labour standards in Kosovo. However, it could also result in Kosovo becoming a semi-integrated labour market, particularly for German-speaking countries, by not only providing just-in-time and on-demand workers for Western labour markets but also offering outsourcing and nearshoring opportunities for Western European companies seeking to save on labour costs—also just-in-time and on-demand, but without labour migration and without harmonisation of labour and social standards. This illustrates the deep intertwining of transnational normative aspirations and the dual structural embeddedness.

Possibilities and Boundaries of Developing Wage and Labour Standards by Migrant Entrepreneurs

According to a representative of the German Embassy in Kosovo, migrant entrepreneurs act as ‘high-performance bridges’, helping to reposition Kosovo within global economic circuits. A striking example is one of the largest call centres in Kosovo, founded by a migrant, which in 2024 employed about 1,500 people, serving primarily German-speaking clients. This company deliberately promotes itself with the slogan ‘Made in Kosova’, contrasting with firms that emphasise ‘Swiss’ or ‘German’ quality labels. At Prishtina’s airport and on the glass façade of its headquarters, advertisements featuring an astronaut and the slogan ‘Explore Kosova’ signal a vision of technological leadership and frontier spirit. These messages target both the diaspora and international audiences and, according to the managing director, have successfully attracted returnees as well as new recruits from Western Europe without family ties to Kosovo—showcasing the perceived attractiveness of both the jobs and the local quality of life.

This article has examined to what extent migrant entrepreneurs shape labour standards, wages, social security and training in Kosovo—areas they themselves highlight as crucial to workers’ quality of life. The findings underscore that while many migrant entrepreneurs do introduce higher wages and improved working conditions, these changes are driven by a combination of normative ideals and labour market pressures embedded in national and transnational contexts. I refer to this approach as the transnational normative and structural embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurship, which expands existing research on the structural embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurship by incorporating a normative dimension. The analysis also focuses on the relationship between norms and structures that are important for the introduction of new labour standards in migrant enterprises. In addition, the limiting and enabling effects of dual structural embeddedness were examined.

Calling attention to structural and asymmetrical power relations and the important role of institutions, and particularly strategic state policies, my findings emphasise that migrant entrepreneurs operate by taking advantage of cross-border asymmetries—notably lower (non-wage) labour costs and minimal tax burdens in Kosovo. These structural advantages enable competitive positioning in international markets. At the same time, migrant entrepreneurs in the ICT sector generate valuable employment, increase wages and elevate social security and training standards. In doing so, they help reduce some cross-border asymmetries that motivate emigration to Western Europe (see also Leutloff-Grandits, 2024).

However, there are clear limits to the scope and sustainability of these developmental interventions. Migrant entrepreneurs often express frustration with limited state support, particularly in education and training, and perceive themselves as substituting for the public sector. Rising training costs and declining availability of skilled workers make investments in human capital increasingly expensive and risky. This reflects a structural embeddedness where private initiatives collide with weak institutional frameworks and inadequate public infrastructure.

Moreover, migrant entrepreneurs face persistent risks of employee emigration to Western Europe. Despite higher wages and improved working conditions, many workers regard their jobs as temporary stepping stones, ultimately seeking the comprehensive social security, healthcare and educational systems abroad. Even when entrepreneurs invest in social security standards locally, they are aware that they cannot compete with Germany, Switzerland or Austria in this regard. This results in a focus on short-term employee retention strategies, often targeting young workers willing to remain in Kosovo for 2–3 years before moving abroad. Consequently, temporary rather than stable employment becomes the norm, undermining sustainability.

These dynamics highlight the urgent need for greater cooperation between migrant entrepreneurs and state actors. Entrepreneurs increasingly call for state or international support to strengthen public education and social security systems, seeing these as essential preconditions for longer-term workforce retention. This would make it more likely that young people would stay in Kosovo or return after a while of studying and/or working abroad. However, Kosovo’s limited tax base, shaped by its low-tax, low-cost economic model—the very conditions that attract outsourcing and nearshoring of Western European business segments and services—constrains public capacity to deliver robust social protections. In this context, state intervention becomes central for any genuine long-term strategy to stabilise the workforce and create conditions for return migration. Without coordinated public investment in education, healthcare and social security, even the most well-intentioned private efforts risk becoming unsustainable, and local talent will continue to leave.

Migrant entrepreneurs in Kosovo’s ICT sector invest in training and labour standards to meet international market demands and to remain competitive, yet these efforts are limited by structural factors, such as state capacity and ongoing emigration pressures. The dual embeddedness of migrant entrepreneurs—between Kosovo’s institutional weaknesses and global market requirements—thus defines both their potential and their constraints. This duality reaffirms the need for stronger state involvement and cross-sectoral collaboration, flanked by the need for more international awareness and support, to convert private developmental initiatives into more sustainable, systemic changes.