The Economic Consequences of 'Brain Drain' of the Best and Brightest: Microeconomic Evidence from Five Countries

By John Gibson, David J. McKenzie. Social Science Research Network, 2010

569 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Brain drain has long been a common concern for migrant-sending countries, particularly for small countries where high-skilled emigration rates are highest. However, while economic theory suggests a number of possible benefits, in addition to costs, from skilled emigration, the evidence base on many of these is very limited. Moreover, the lessons from case studies of benefits to China and India from skilled emigration may not be relevant to much smaller countries. This paper presents the results of innovative surveys which tracked academic high-achievers from five countries to wherever they moved in the world in order to directly measure at the micro level the channels through which high-skilled emigration affects the sending country. The results show that there are very high levels of emigration and of return migration among the very highly skilled; the income gains to the best and brightest from migrating are very large, and an order of magnitude or more greater than any other effect; there are large benefits from migration in terms of postgraduate education; most high-skilled migrants from poorer countries send remittances; but that involvement in trade and foreign direct investment is a rare occurrence. There is considerable knowledge flow from both current and return migrants about job and study opportunities abroad, but little net knowledge sharing from current migrants to home country governments or businesses. Finally, the fiscal costs vary considerably across countries, and depend on the extent to which governments rely on progressive income taxation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/552e41a1e9006b1ffde986ea869472447554afce

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Citations in the corpus

The Making of Modern America: Migratory Flows in the Age of Mass Migration (2012, background): “Clearly, such behavior is hard to explain in simple income-maximizing models in the presence of large wage differentials [Sjastaad 1962, Harris and Todaro 1970, Gibson and McKenzie 2009].”
Climatic Factors as Determinants of International Migration (2015, unknown): “This model has been successfully applied to analyze the specific role of wage differentials (Grogger and Hanson, 2011), the significance of social networks (Beine et al. 2011) and the brain drain phenomenon (Gibson and McKenzie, 2011).”
The mover’s advantage: The superior performance of migrant scientists (2014, unknown): “…because, assuming that earnings – or fellowships for study – are an increasing function of ability, only more capable scientists are offered opportunities that are sufficiently large to outbalance the cost of relocation (Borjas, 1994; Grogger and Hanson, 2011; Gibson and McKenzie, 2012).”
Life (Dis)Satisfaction and the Intention to Migrate: Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe (2014, background): “[33] Gibson, J.”
Human Capital and Development Accounting: New Evidence from Wage Gains at Migration (2018, unknown): “(2010) and Gibson et al. (2015)). It is comforting that these papers typically find wage gains that are in line with ours (when compared to the size of the GDP per worker gap).(5) The main difference from our work is that we have a broader sample (immigrants from many countries to the United States)”
A Panel Data Analysis of the Brain Gain (2011, background): “Gibson and McKenzie (2009) show that Tonga s "best and brightest" students contemplated emigration while still in high school, which led them to take additional classes and make changes in their courses choices.”
Migration, entrepreneurship and development: critical questions (2017, unknown): “In addition, new evidence suggests that out-migration of highly skilled individuals has substantial benefits, mainly for “the migrants themselves, who benefit through massive gains in income and through greater human capital” (Gibson and McKenzie 2012: 371).”
The interregional migration of human capital and its regional consequences: a review (2017, unknown): “As explained by Granato et al. (2015, p. 515), ‘[i]n a neoclassical model setting where the labour market is flexible and competitive and mobility costs are not too high, workers tend to move from high to low unemployment regions in search of better labour market prospects’. This ultimately contribu”