Really excited to see where this substack goes, but I have to start off with some disagreements! The remittances point is fine, as is return migration. But the literature on brain gain has always seemed pretty uncompelling.
The most obvious problem is that increasing the supply of skilled workers requires both increasing demand for education (which emigration possibilities do) and increasing the supply of education. The latter is not a given in any country. Expanding college enrolment is hard. New colleges need staff, instructors, and administrators, all of which are scarce. Government colleges need to be established by a bureaucracy, private colleges need to be regulated and quality-controlled, both of which require a lot of governance capacity by the country. We can’t just handwave the claim that if more people want to become doctors, more people can become doctors.
So I’m concerned that there’s a site selection bias in the countries studied in this literature. People are writing papers about the countries that did manage to successfully pull off a large educational expansion, so they find that emigration boosted human capital. But for countries that can’t pull it off, emigration really might be a brain drain.
How large could this site selection bias be? I pulled some data on college enrolment rates and emigration (net, not for any skill group) and compared India and the Philippines to the rest of them. (There was no data on Cabo Verde, the other country you cited.) Among the top 20 emigrant-sending developing countries, India had one of the highest increases in college enrolment (21 pp) between 1990 and 2015, while the Philippines was a bit above average (13 pp). As a specific contrasting example, Nigeria had only a 7 pp increase in college enrollment during this period. (data, graph)
A similar picture emerges when comparing India and the Philippines to developing countries as a whole. India has close to the highest enrolment growth over this period, and the Philippines is still above average, while Nigeria is still below average. (graph) So we should not expect Nigeria’s brain gain to be anywhere close to that of India or the Philippines.
You could argue that India and the Philippines had higher growth because emigration incentives increased the supply of education. But:
The emigration incentives studied by Khanna/Morales and Abarcar/Theoharides are not India-specific or Philippines-specific—this fact is necessary for their estimates to be causal! - so we shouldn’t expect these countries to have larger increases in enrolment just from emigration incentives.
Even if emigration incentives have a causal effect on the supply of colleges that was for some reason higher in India and the Philippines, I would expect that effect to be small relative to other factors that make governments want to supply more colleges (domestic political projects, trying to attract foreign companies, trying to spur industrial growth). So heterogeneous effects of emigration incentives can’t explain much of the difference between these two countries and other developing countries.
In general, I wish there was more nuance around the brain gain hypothesis. I would speculate it has such immediate acceptance because it resolves our conflicting commitments as cosmopolitans: we want people to be able to pursue a better life, we want high-income countries to have more open immigration policy, and we want low-income countries to grow faster. The brain gain hypothesis is alluring because it promises that we can have all of the above. But I think that relies on other things going right that absolutely don’t have to go right. And I wish there was more acceptance of that nuance.
“In general, I wish there was more nuance around the brain gain hypothesis. I would speculate it has such immediate acceptance because it resolves our conflicting commitments as cosmopolitans: we want people to be able to pursue a better life, we want high-income countries to have more open immigration policy, and we want low-income countries to grow faster.”
This describes a bit of what’s going on in my head. I often feel guilty around the lack of opportunities for my colleagues here, and the slow economic growth. If the brain gain hypothesis is true, its a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card for my conscience so I really, really want to believe it.
(xpost)
Really excited to see where this substack goes, but I have to start off with some disagreements! The remittances point is fine, as is return migration. But the literature on brain gain has always seemed pretty uncompelling.
The most obvious problem is that increasing the supply of skilled workers requires both increasing demand for education (which emigration possibilities do) and increasing the supply of education. The latter is not a given in any country. Expanding college enrolment is hard. New colleges need staff, instructors, and administrators, all of which are scarce. Government colleges need to be established by a bureaucracy, private colleges need to be regulated and quality-controlled, both of which require a lot of governance capacity by the country. We can’t just handwave the claim that if more people want to become doctors, more people can become doctors.
So I’m concerned that there’s a site selection bias in the countries studied in this literature. People are writing papers about the countries that did manage to successfully pull off a large educational expansion, so they find that emigration boosted human capital. But for countries that can’t pull it off, emigration really might be a brain drain.
How large could this site selection bias be? I pulled some data on college enrolment rates and emigration (net, not for any skill group) and compared India and the Philippines to the rest of them. (There was no data on Cabo Verde, the other country you cited.) Among the top 20 emigrant-sending developing countries, India had one of the highest increases in college enrolment (21 pp) between 1990 and 2015, while the Philippines was a bit above average (13 pp). As a specific contrasting example, Nigeria had only a 7 pp increase in college enrollment during this period. (data, graph)
A similar picture emerges when comparing India and the Philippines to developing countries as a whole. India has close to the highest enrolment growth over this period, and the Philippines is still above average, while Nigeria is still below average. (graph) So we should not expect Nigeria’s brain gain to be anywhere close to that of India or the Philippines.
You could argue that India and the Philippines had higher growth because emigration incentives increased the supply of education. But:
The emigration incentives studied by Khanna/Morales and Abarcar/Theoharides are not India-specific or Philippines-specific—this fact is necessary for their estimates to be causal! - so we shouldn’t expect these countries to have larger increases in enrolment just from emigration incentives.
Even if emigration incentives have a causal effect on the supply of colleges that was for some reason higher in India and the Philippines, I would expect that effect to be small relative to other factors that make governments want to supply more colleges (domestic political projects, trying to attract foreign companies, trying to spur industrial growth). So heterogeneous effects of emigration incentives can’t explain much of the difference between these two countries and other developing countries.
In general, I wish there was more nuance around the brain gain hypothesis. I would speculate it has such immediate acceptance because it resolves our conflicting commitments as cosmopolitans: we want people to be able to pursue a better life, we want high-income countries to have more open immigration policy, and we want low-income countries to grow faster. The brain gain hypothesis is alluring because it promises that we can have all of the above. But I think that relies on other things going right that absolutely don’t have to go right. And I wish there was more acceptance of that nuance.
“In general, I wish there was more nuance around the brain gain hypothesis. I would speculate it has such immediate acceptance because it resolves our conflicting commitments as cosmopolitans: we want people to be able to pursue a better life, we want high-income countries to have more open immigration policy, and we want low-income countries to grow faster.”
This describes a bit of what’s going on in my head. I often feel guilty around the lack of opportunities for my colleagues here, and the slow economic growth. If the brain gain hypothesis is true, its a bit of a get-out-of-jail-free card for my conscience so I really, really want to believe it.