Thank you @danielyu for your argument on Africa’s potential to scale development by value added exports.
I just have a question about the Africa Jobs Fund’s cost effectiveness model. Does it input losses to source countries as a result of skilled labour migration? I think this is very important if we are considering health worker migration from an extrawelfarist perspective.
Which then brings me to @Charles Kenny article on emigration. Thank you for mentioning the safeguards needed to prevent losses incurred by source countries. I fear at the moment, a lot of African countries do not have these safeguards in place and as such, social losses could be greater than individual gains.
Thanks so much for these comments and those on your substack. I do think we need to be careful to assume skilled emigration is always a triple win for movers origin and destination countries and agree strongly we need policies to help ensure that, and you point about the equity benefits of emigration is well taken. But I would make a couple of points on movement of medical professionals (references below). The data for the Philippines suggests that the country has considerably more nurses per capita than you would expect at its income level, with a recent estimate being that the opportunity to migrate encourages nine nurses to train for each one that ends up migrating. And (admittedly two decade old) analysis by Michael Clemens looking at African medical professional migration concluded: “The results presented here fail to detect any negative impact of even massive movements of health professionals out of Africa upon health worker stocks, basic primary health care availability, and public health outcomes in African migrant-sending countries. ”
Thank you @danielyu for your argument on Africa’s potential to scale development by value added exports.
I just have a question about the Africa Jobs Fund’s cost effectiveness model. Does it input losses to source countries as a result of skilled labour migration? I think this is very important if we are considering health worker migration from an extrawelfarist perspective.
Which then brings me to @Charles Kenny article on emigration. Thank you for mentioning the safeguards needed to prevent losses incurred by source countries. I fear at the moment, a lot of African countries do not have these safeguards in place and as such, social losses could be greater than individual gains.
Then I have a few reservations on the benefits you described which I feel is too long to write here. I did take my time to talk about them in my Substack commentary here: https://zubecommentary.substack.com/p/eze-jakpas-abroad
Thanks so much for these comments and those on your substack. I do think we need to be careful to assume skilled emigration is always a triple win for movers origin and destination countries and agree strongly we need policies to help ensure that, and you point about the equity benefits of emigration is well taken. But I would make a couple of points on movement of medical professionals (references below). The data for the Philippines suggests that the country has considerably more nurses per capita than you would expect at its income level, with a recent estimate being that the opportunity to migrate encourages nine nurses to train for each one that ends up migrating. And (admittedly two decade old) analysis by Michael Clemens looking at African medical professional migration concluded: “The results presented here fail to detect any negative impact of even massive movements of health professionals out of Africa upon health worker stocks, basic primary health care availability, and public health outcomes in African migrant-sending countries. ”
https://voxdev.org/topic/migration-urbanisation/brain-drain-vs-brain-gain-does-international-migration-deplete-poor
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/13123_file_Clemens_Do_visas_kill_3_.pdf