Brain drain or brain gain?

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Human capital

Building high-quality human capital stock depends not only on the high quality of education, but also on a country's ability to attract and retain skilled people. This section focuses on emigration and brain drain, using data on international bilateral migration for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and non-OECD countries of origin and destination, based on census data for 100 countries in 2000 and 60 countries in 1990.¹ An aggregated group-level breakdown is presented in Table 4.1.

Almost 75 per cent of migrants from countries in the transition region emigrated to other countries in the transition region. Migration from countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union – primarily to Russia, but also to Kazakhstan and Ukraine – played a major role, alongside migration between former Yugoslav countries (partly owing to the wars of the 1990s). The percentage of migration within the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia was lower for high-skilled emigrants, indicating that more developed transition countries became a more attractive destination for high-skilled emigrants from less developed countries.

The United States, Germany, Canada and Australia were among the top advanced economy destinations for emigrants from the transition region in both 1990 and 2000. There are also some interesting patterns involving neighbouring countries. The majority of Albanian emigrants moved to Greece and Italy, while Bulgarian emigrants favoured Turkey. Finland had the second largest stock of Estonian emigrants (after Russia), while Poland was the most popular choice for emigrants from Lithuania. Slovak emigrants mainly chose the Czech Republic. In virtually all countries in the transition region, emigration to a neighbouring country tended to be more popular for the less educated than for their high-skilled counterparts.²

The majority of emigrants from Turkey moved to Germany and the United States. Germany was particularly attractive for low-skilled workers. The top destinations for emigrants from Egypt were Saudi Arabia and Libya, while Jordanians opted for Palestine, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Moroccans favoured France, Israel and Spain, and Tunisians chose France, Israel and Libya. The differences in terms of destinations between less and more educated emigrants were more pronounced in the SEMED region than in transition countries, particularly for emigration to the United States and Canada.

The migration patterns shown in Table 4.1 are important because destination countries can have a substantial impact on migrants' countries of origin through remittances, return migration and the creation of trade and business networks.³ That said, the first-order effect of emigration on the human capital stock of the country of origin is the loss of skilled labour – the classic brain drain problem.

Chart 4.6 illustrates this loss by showing high-skilled net emigration stock rates (net emigration as a share of the country’s native labour force) for transition and SEMED countries. All countries experienced emigration by their high-skilled workers, but also received high-skilled immigrants from other countries. Several former Yugoslav countries suffered the worst brain drain, owing to the wars in the early 1990s.

In most countries net emigration rates were higher in 2000 than they had been in 1990. Estonia seems to have benefited the most. Its gross emigration rate was relatively high in both 1990 and 2000, but immigrants to Estonia were also highly skilled. Latvia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and Russia also appear to have been net “winners” in recent years.

While complete data are not yet available, it is likely that brain drain accelerated after 2000 with the accession to the EU of eight transition countries in 2004, followed by Bulgaria and Romania in 2007 and Croatia in 2013. There is some evidence that substantial numbers of high-skilled workers have emigrated from some of these countries to incumbent EU countries. This trend may have been reinforced by the global economic crisis seen since 2008, as social and political problems associated with recessions (such as poverty, unemployment, discrimination and repression) tend to increase emigration, particularly emigration by high-skilled workers.⁴

1. See Artuç et al. (2013). [back]
2. See Artuç et al. (2013) and Docquier and Rapoport (2012). The exceptions in 2000 were migrants moving from Bosnia and Herzegovina to Serbia and Montenegro, from Georgia to Armenia, from Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan, from Poland to Germany, from Moldova to Romania and from Russia to Kazakhstan, but the differences were only small. [back]
3. See Docquier and Rapoport (2012) and Burchardi and Hassan (2013). [back]
4. See Docquier and Rapoport (2012). [back]

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