As children of the brain drain (literally as well as figuratively) we are conditioned to think of India’s million-strong brain drain represents just 4.3% of its vast graduate populationthe free market in labor as a good thing for all parties involved. Certainly, free movement of talented professionals has been good for migrating professionals and for the people of the first world — 25% of the doctors in North America, Britain and Australia are immigrants who attended medical school abroad. [Link]
A trickier question concerns the implications of the brain drain for the people in the sending country, the country that the doctors are being drained from. The effects of the brain drain there can be ambiguous – while it leeches away many talented professionals, it also creates incentives for others (who might not have seen education as lucrative before) to get educated, and can therefore create a more educated population than would have existed without brain drain. Some people argue that this is why India has benefitted from/despite brain drain while other countries have been damaged by it. According to the Economist:
Indian students had little reason to learn computer coding before there was a software industry to employ them. But such an industry could not take root without computer engineers to man it. The dream of a job in Silicon Valley, however, was enough to lure many of India’s bright young things into coding, and that was enough to hatch an indigenous software industry where none existed before.
India’s valley-dwellers represent just one contingent in a much larger diaspora. According to the most exhaustive study of the brain drain, released last month by the World Bank, there were 1.04m Indian-born people, educated past secondary school, living in the 30 relatively rich countries of the OECD in 2000. (An unknown number of them acquired their education outside their country of birth, the report notes.) This largely successful diaspora is more than just something to envy and emulate. Its members can be a source of know-how and money, and provide valuable entrées into foreign markets and supply chains.
But Messrs Kapur and McHale think India’s relatively happy experience with its educated emigrés is more likely to be the exception than the rule. Its million-strong brain drain represents just 4.3% of its vast graduate population, according to the Bank. By contrast, almost 47% of Ghana’s highly educated native sons live in the OECD; for Guyana, the figure is 89%. This is not a stimulative leeching of talent; it is a haemorrhage. [Link]
.)
The New York Times reports
“
