Brain drain or brain bank? The impact of skilled emigration on poor-country innovation
By Ajay Agrawal, Devesh Kapur, J. McHale. 2008
138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The development prospects of a poor country depend in part on its capacity for innovation. The productivity of its innovators depends in turn on their access to technological knowledge. The emigration of highly skilled individuals weakens local knowledge networks (brain drain), but may also help remaining innovators access valuable knowledge accumulated abroad (brain bank). We develop a model in which the size of the optimal innovator diaspora depends on the competing strengths of co-location and diaspora effects for accessing knowledge. Then, using patent citation data associated with inventions from India, we estimate the key co-location and diaspora parameters; the net effect of innovator emigration is to harm domestic knowledge access, on average. However, knowledge access conferred by the diaspora is particularly valuable in the production of India's most important inventions as measured by citations received. Thus, our findings imply that the optimal emigration level may depend, at least partly, on the relative value resulting from the most cited compared to average inventions.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a61c24f7e63121119ec3d14fb48a93e64e1b7e1
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Global Talent Flows (2016, unknown): “With respect to productivity development, analyses like Kerr (2008) and Agrawal et al. (2011) document that countries gain access to technical information from their overseas community, but there is substantial heterogeneity in the strength of these connections and the types of transfers facilitated”
- Emigration and Democracy (2011, unknown): “, 2011) and to contribute to the di¤usion of technology (Kerr, 2008, Agrawal et al., 2011) as well as to the transfer of norms of low fertility (Fargues, 2007, Beine, Docquier and Schi¤, 2008) and, in the case of foreign students, to the di¤usion of democracy (Spilimbergo, 2009). In particular, Spil”
- Returning scientists and the emergence of China’s science system (2019, unknown): “Through this channel, they may thus help in the further development of their home research system (Agrawal et al. 2011; Wagner et al. 2018).”
- High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration (2017, unknown): “Examples include Stephan and Levin (2001), Kerr (2008), Stephan (2010), Hunt and Gauthier-Loiselle (2010), Kerr and Lincoln (2010), Agrawal et al. (2011), Stuen et al. (2012), Ozgen et al. (2011), Parrotta et al. (2014), Bosetti et al.”
- Global Collaborative Patents (2018, unknown): “…Kogut (1999), Kapur (2001), Rosenkopf and Almeida (2003), Kapur and McHale (2005a, b), Agrawal et al. (2006), MacGarvie (2006), Kerr (2008), Papageorgiou and Spilimbergo (2008), Oettl and Agrawal (2008), Nanda and Khanna (2010), Agrawal et al. (2011), Foley and Kerr (2013) and Ghani et al. (2014).”
- How Much Does Immigration Boost Innovation? (2009, background): “[2] Agrawal, Ajay, Devesh Kapur and John McHale.”
- Run away? Air pollution and emigration interests in China (2017, background): “Agrawal et al. (2011) indicate that the emigration of highly skilled individuals weakens local knowledge networks (brain drain) but may help remaining innovators access valuable knowledge accumulated abroad (brain bank).”
- The wider economic impacts of high-skilled migrants: a survey of the literature for receiving countries (2013, unknown): “There is a well-established ‘ ethnic entrepreneurs ’ literature that links migrant and minority communities to self-employment, entrepreneurial activity and small business formation (Light 1984; Aldrich and Waldinger 1990; Kloosterman and Rath 2001; Baycan-Levent and Nijkamp 2009).”