Heh, the article’s somewhat contradiction on that does reflect my ambivalence… on the one hand I do think the manufacturing led path is getting narrower, on the other hand I think emigration can help countries get on the path. On AI and services, I think it may depend on the type—business process outsourcing I don’t think (?) has taken a big hit yet but could well be a matter of time, don’t know about software jobs in India, but could imagine they might also decline. On the other hand tourism, medical tourism both comparatively AI proof, and many things probably somewhere in between?
Charles Kenny
Karma: 45
Just on South Africa and migration, as you say a magnet for migration from the region. The country’s emigrants rarely return and net remittances are negative—both a sign of a comparatively weak diaspora community a comparatively large immigrant population for its income level. It certainly isn’t leading in using emigration as a growth strategy, for all it is playing an important role in reducing poverty and deprivation in countries to its North.
Hi Oscar! I think emigration has the most potential impact on emigrant incomes when it is from poor countries and (secondarily) small countries—the first because the potential income gaps are the largest the second because the chance of finding the right fit for your talents is larger in larger countries (few small island states have a thriving automobile or software industry just because they take some scale). I’d also say that lower income countries with a growing workforce but few good jobs, that most need the trade and investment links and knowledge flows that come along with diaspora populations, do usually benefit the most from emigration.
Meanwhile high income countries seeing considerable net emigration rather than flows mostly in and some out are comparatively rare and are usually seeing something weird going on that is probably economic bad news. The US may be seeing net emigration at the moment, for example, and I don’t think it is a good sign for the country. More broadly, I think rich countries with low birth rates usually want to be seeing net immigration and if they aren’t it is bad for growth. Emigration in and of itself is not necessarily a problem in that it comes along with all of the trade, investment and knowledge generation links, but if it isn’t matched by higher immigration, it is often a worrying sign.
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