Abstract
World financial crisis 2008 reshaped not only the theoretical and institutional settings but also generated a re-thinking process for new migration theories, skills, employment and occupational choices. The contraction in world economy depicted huge distortions in the labor market in the forms of increasing unemployment and vulnerable employment rates and widening social gaps in employment in the most of the countries. With a view to broaden the perspective of socio-economic analysis on occupational dynamics in Greece, this paper focuses on three objectives; first, to analyze pre-migration and post-migration occupational composition of Pakistani migrant workers in Greece, second, to investigate the determinants of post migration occupational change, and third, to examine the direction of occupational change of Pakistani migrants to Greece. For this purpose, through pre-structured questionnaire, the primary data is collected from 230 Pakistani migrants in Greece who belong to district Gujrat (Pakistan). Major pre-migration occupations of migrants to Greece were self-employment, studentship and agriculture. We have employed binary logistic regression analysis to investigate the determinants of occupational change. The estimates show that migrants who have tried to change their pre-migration occupations, and they have been successful, they claim that success remarkably depends on migrants’ legal status, duration of stay, social ties, skills and education. The majority of the migrants with different pre-migration occupations has changed their occupations and adopts the labor profession in Greece.