Sänd mina rötter regn

Förra veckan skrev jag om ett norskt förslag om att inte anställa vårdpersonal från fattiga länder. Tanken är att brain drain, när kvalificerad arbetskraft flyttar ut, är skadlig och att det därför är bättre om de stannar i sina hemländer. Jag nämnde ett par invändningar, bland annat att utbildningspremien ökar på grund av möjligheten att flytta. Idag tipsar Chris Dillow (ni bör läsa hans blogg, gör ni inte det så får ni skylla er själva) om en studie från IZA med titeln Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Micro Evidence from an African Success Story. Och det sexiga abstractet:

Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey purposely designed and conducted to answer this specific question for the case of Cape Verde – the African country with the largest fraction of tertiary educated population living abroad, despite also having a fast-growing stock of human capital. Unlike previous literature, our tailored survey allows us to adjust existing inflated “brain drain” numbers for educational upgrading of emigrants after migration. We do so by combining our survey data on current, return and non-migrants with information from censuses of the destination countries. Our micro data also enables us to propose a novel, explicit test of “brain gain” arguments according to which the possibility of own future emigration positively impacts educational attainment in the origin country. Crucially, the innovative empirical strategy we propose hinges on the ideal characteristics of our survey, namely on full histories of migrants and on a new set of exclusion restrictions to control for unobserved heterogeneity of emigrants. Our results point to a very substantial impact of the “brain gain” channel on the educational attainment of those left behind. Alternative channels (namely remittances, family disruption, and general equilibrium effects at the local level) are also considered, but these do not seem to play an important role. Overall, we find that there may be substantial human capital gains from allowing free migration and encouraging return migration.

This entry was posted on torsdag, september 27th, 2007 at 22.02 and is filed under Utveckling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.