The number of expats is rather stable: Danish engineers and economists working abroad

aggregate data from the Danish economist’s and the engineer’s trade unions show that during the last decade there has been stagnation in the number of expatriates. Taking into consideration that the three trade unions cover the very large majority of Danish knowledge workers occupying foreign jobs, and taking their very high membership density into consideration, there is no evidence for the supposed large fall in number of traditional expatriates as supposed by international literature. This does however not mean that expatriation will continue to be the preferred form of control and coordination of activities across national borders – the growth in foreign operations seems to be followed by new ways of organizing operations and by new employment models, signaling qualitative, rather than quantitative, changes. The paper is mainly mapping the domain through descriptive statistics and speculations are presented concerning the lack of interrelations between changes in FDI’s, the level of expatriates send out from Denmark.