The conventional answer is a resounding "of course." And certainly a dynamic in which wealthy Western nations drawing away talented minds from the developing world looks like a zero-sum game, with clear winners and losers.
After all, people can't be in two places at once. Further, while they might have notable careers in the West, they give up the opportunity to have a transformative impact on public health systems, universities, civil society, public culture and the world of letters back home.
Finally, to add insult to injury, in some fields-- particularly medicine and nursing-- the people who leave were trained, sometimes at government expense, by their home countries. It's bad enough to have that promising young scientist go to Oxford for his D.Phil and never return; it's even worse to lose a virologist trained at the national university.
But is brain drain really such a zero sum game? A Nature editorial (sub req) suggests that it may not be. Brain drain, it notes, is still
a policy fixation in European science, a concern for at least three-quarters of American states, and, most of all, a major strategic headache for developing countries.
In South Africa, for example, the government has demonized institutions that train doctors and nurses who leave for employment elsewhere. It has taken steps to penalize those state-trained health professionals who choose to leave.
But South Africa is wrong. Its perception of the brain drain — as a simple transaction in which the recipient gains and the donor loses — is, at best, incomplete.
One data-point is a recent study by economist Michael Clemens on the impact of health professional emigration on African health care systems. As Clemens writes:
Conventional wisdom says that, because low-income countries need skilled professionals to develop, their migration to better-paying countries is unequivocally bad--when they leave, poor countries lose engineers' ideas, lawyers' contracts, and physicians' care. So the recent surge in the international mass migration of highly skilled workers has many worrying: will the loss of skilled professionals stymie development?
What's the answer?
[I]mpeding the migration of skilled health professionals, by sending and receiving countries, does little to improve health systems or heath outcomes in Africa.
The Nature editorial argues that this apparently counterintuitive conclusion makes sense:
This is not so strange, when you think about it. Countries and professions with more openness and greater mobility of personnel are more likely to be in touch with global trends — and more likely to attract able trainees in the first place.
In other words, all the arrows point the same way. Countries that have people who are well-trained enough to be attractive on the global market are more likely to have better medical systems and educational institutions, and to be more a part of scientific and professional worlds-- in other words, they're not the poorest countries, but ones that aren't doing too badly.
Finally, there's the role that these emigrants play as sources of global connections-- and hard cash.
The tendency of perhaps half of today's emigrants to return home later on in their careers is another factor. So is remuneration and the large amounts of cash that migrants send back home. These changes make the old model of immigrant 'donor' societies obsolescent. Communities can benefit, financially and intellectually, from those who have left. It is the degree to which these benefits counteract the unquestionable initial loss that is open to question.
Unexpected dynamics may not be at work only between the developing and developed world. Migration opportunities between Western countries may also work to the benefit of migrants' home countries.
Similar observations could be made regarding emigration flows between wealthy nations. According to the World Bank, Britain has more professional émigrés than any nation on Earth. But... [a]ccording to surveys of citations against expenditure, Britain has one of the most productive research systems in the world. How can this be?
Well, say the revisionists, science departments at British universities may actually benefit from the ambition to depart, and, to a lesser degree, from their connections with those who have done so. Perish the thought, but some of these mobile researchers may even do the best work of their lives at Salford, say, only to take their foot ever-so-slightly off the gas when they 'arrive' at Stanford.
Certainly this is an interesting piece, but I'm not entirely sanguine about the net benefits of brain drain. For one thing, I'd be interested to know how language and GDP affect the ability of migrants to stay in touch with, and eventually return home to, their countries of origin. Do Haiti and Costa Rica, or Cambodia and Singapore, experience brain drain the same way?
It would also be good to know to what degree developing nations that can train skilled migrants also serve as magnets for talent from the developed world. If I'm a restless physicist, say, eager to leave my postdoc in Austin research semiconductors and do some more meaningful work on alternative energy in the developing world, where am I likely to go? To a place so far away you have to fall off the edge of the flat world to get there? or a country I find through one of my advisor's former students, who went back a few years ago and now runs the national bureau of standards?
Technorati Tags: brain circulation, globalization, science
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