Highly-educated citizens of low-income countries tend to decamp to higher-income countries in a quest for better pay. It's called "human capital flight" or, maybe catchier, brain drain.
But according to a review paper published on May 22 in Science, there may also be indirect "brain gain" effects. The research was co-authored by Johannes Haushofer, a development and behavioral economist and professor of economics and public policy in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.
The researchers found that migration opportunities often increase the stock of human capital in the countries of origin and produce other beneficial effects, like money sent "home" or foreign direct investment and trade linkages. They found that émigrés may also transfer knowledge, technology and norms, and that return migration, which is common, can also impart benefits to the home country.
"A lot of focus has been on, 'Let's get people back in their country of origin. These people are no use to us if they are gone,'" Haushofer said. "Yes, let's make the barriers to return as low as we can, but just focusing on getting people back might not be the right approach."
A highly educated worker who leaves a country like the Philippines or Uganda can often contribute more from abroad, he said, either via higher wages that are in part sent home to family members, or by foreign direct investment and establishing business relationships and networks that operate by personal connections.
"These can be facilitated through migrants," Haushofer said. "And remittances are an obvious potential benefit - in many less developed countries this money can make up a large part of household income."
He says another potential benefit of highly educated workers emigrating to more remunerative countries is the role-model effect. As motivational speakers say, if you see it, you can be it. If young people see successful pathways to upward mobility, they are more likely to set goals, dig in and work hard.
One-third of doctors trained in Ghana have emigrated, 91% of Ethiopian-born Ph.D. holders are abroad and two-thirds of software engineering graduates from top Canadian universities work in other countries. It's a natural concern that such high rates represent a substantial loss of human capital in the countries sending their workers abroad.
But Haushofer and co-authors argue that by examining modern empirical evidence on the full range of direct and indirect effects of emigration, it is clear that migration opportunities can increase human capital in origin economies and improve the well-being of the population overall.
For example, the mass emigration of Filipino nurses to the U.S. has been widely documented. But for each new nurse that moved abroad, nine new nurses were licensed in the Philippines, according to Haushofer. Since the pandemic, the Filipino government has worked to improve benefits such as health insurance, housing and educational programs for nurses who stay in the Philippines.
Similarly, when a visa cap was relaxed in the U.S. that allowed more Indian information technology workers to migrate there, Indian students and workers acquired computer science skills at a much higher rate, increasing domestic IT employment and earnings.
Migration opportunities for these nurses and IT workers produced more nurses and IT workers in the home countries, while also improving or expanding training and educational infrastructure. But Haushofer admits that it is possible that chasing these jobs abroad may steer young people's decisions away from investing in other skills or professional pursuits, so the net effect in the home countries can be complicated. He says measuring whether migration causes mismatches of skilled workers versus needs should be a subject of future research.
Among academics, inventors, scientists, engineers and medical professionals from smaller and low-income countries, emigration rates are high. But the study shows that simply observing out-migration does not necessarily imply a net loss in human capital in origin countries; migration opportunities can also create new human capital in origin countries as well as downstream beneficial effects, Haushofer said.
