Immigration barriers and net brain drain

Orazbayev, Sultan (2017): Immigration barriers and net brain drain.

Abstract

Education and employment histories of more than 650 thousand scientists contained in ORCID data can shed light on the patterns of brain drain and brain gain in over 200 countries (and territories) over the last 40 years. The incidence of brain drain and brain gain is positively correlated across space and time. More restrictive immigration policy towards skilled workers and students is associated with lower levels of skilled emigration (brain drain), consistent with competition of domestic and foreign scientists for a limited number of domestic academic posts. However, after controlling for time and country heterogeneity, increased barriers to immigration are associated with a relatively larger effect on the inflow of skilled immigrants (brain gain), so more restrictive policy is associated with net brain drain.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: brain drain; brain gain; high-skilled migration; scientific mobility; immigration policy
• Subjects: F - International Economics > F2 - International Factor Movements and International Business; F - International Economics > F2 - International Factor Movements and International Business > F22 - International Migration; F - International Economics > F6 - Economic Impacts of Globalization; F - International Economics > F6 - Economic Impacts of Globalization > F63 - Economic Development; J - Labor and Demographic Economics > J6 - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers > J61 - Geographic Labor Mobility ; Immigrant Workers; O - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth > O1 - Economic Development > O15 - Human Resources ; Human Development ; Income Distribution ; Migration

References

Ali, Showkat, Giles Carden, Benjamin Culling, Rosalind Hunter, Andrew J Oswald, Nicola Owen, Hilda Ralsmark, and Natalie Snodgrass (2007). “Elite scientists and the global brain drain”. Research Paper No.825.

Appelt, Silvia, Brigitte van Beuzekom, Fernando Galindo-Rueda, and Roberto de Pinho (2015). “Which factors influence the international mobility of research scientists?” In: Global Mobility of Research Scientists: The Economics of Who Goes Where and Why. Ed. by Aldo Geuna. Academic Press, pp. 177-214.

Beine, Michel, Frederic Docquier, and Hillel Rapoport (2008). “Brain drain and human capital formation in developing countries: winners and losers”. In: The Economic Journal 118 (528), pp. 631-652.

Borjas, George J and Kirk B Doran (2012). “The collapse of the Soviet Union and the productivity of American Mathematicians”. In: The Quarterly Journal of Economics 1143, p. 1203.

Borjas, George J and Kirk B Doran (2015). “How High-Skill Immigration Affects Science: Evidence from the Collapse of the USSR”. In: Innovation Policy and the Economy 15 (1), pp. 1-25.

Cao, Cong (2008). “China's brain drain at the high end: why government policies have failed to attract first-rate academics to return”. In: Asian Population Studies 4 (3), pp. 331-345.

Czaika, Mathias and Hein de Haas (2016). “The effect of visas on migration processes”. In: International Migration Review. doi: 10.1111/imre.12261.

Czaika, Mathias and Sultan Orazbayev (2016). “Globalisation of scientific mobility”. In: Mimeo.

Czaika, Mathias and Sorana Toma (2015). “Path-dependency in international academic careers”. In: International Migration Institute Working Paper Series 108.

DEMIG (2015). “DEMIG POLICY, version 1.3, Online Edition”. International Migration Institute, University of Oxford.

Dezhina, Irina (2015). “Economic sanctions and science in Russia”. In: Russian Economic Developments (11), pp. 73-76.

Dietz, James S, Ivan Chompalov, Barry Bozeman, Eliesh O'Neil Lane, and Jong won Park (2000). “Using the curriculum vita to study the career paths of sci entists and engineers: An exploratory assessment”. In: Scientometrics 49 (3), pp. 419-442.

Fangmeng, Tian (2016). “Brain circulation, diaspora and scientific progress: A study of the international migration of Chinese scientists, 1998-2006”. In: Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 25 (3), pp. 296-319.

Fernandez-Zubieta, Ana, Aldo Geuna, and Cornelia Lawson (2015). “What do we know of the mobility of research scientists and of its impact on scientific production”. mimeo.

Finn, Michael G (2014). Stay rates of foreign doctorate recipients from US universities, 2011. Tech. rep. Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education Oak Ridge.

Franzoni, Chiara, Giuseppe Scellato, and Paula Stephan (2012). “Foreign-born scientists: mobility patterns for 16 countries”. In: Nature Biotechnology 30 (12), pp. 1250-1253.

Freeman, Richard B and Wei Huang (2015). China's “Great Leap Forward” in Science and Engineering. Tech. rep. National Bureau of Economic Research.

Ganguli, Ina (2015). “Who leaves and who stays? Evidence on immigrant selection from the collapse of Soviet science”. In: Global Mobility of Research Scientists: The Economics of Who Goes Where and Why. Ed. by Aldo Geuna. Academic Press, p. 133.

Haak, Laurel, Josh Brown, Matthew Buys, Ana Patricia Cardoso, Paula De main, Tom Demeranville, Maaike Duine, Stephanie Harley, Sarah Hershberger, Liz Krznarich, Alice Meadows, Nobuko Miyairi, Angel Montenegro, Laura Paglione, Lilian Pessoa, Robert Peters, Fran Ramı́rez Monge, Will Simpson, Catalina Wilmers, and Douglas Wright (2016). “ORCID Public Data File 2016”. In: doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.4134027.v1.

Haak, Laurel, Martin Fenner, Laura Paglione, Ed Pentz, and Howard Ratner (2012) . “ORCID: a system to uniquely identify researchers”. In: Learned Publishing 25 (4), pp. 259-264.

Hunter, Rosalind S, Andrew J Oswald, and Bruce G Charlton (2009). “The Elite Brain Drain”. In: The Economic Journal 119 (538), F231-F251.

Kerr, Sari Pekkala, William R. Kerr, Çağlar Özden, and Christopher A. Parsons (2016) . “Global Talent Flows”. In: Journal of Economic Perspectives 30 (4), pp. 83-106.

Moser, Petra, Alessandra Voena, and Fabian Waldinger (2014). “German Jewish émigrés and US invention”. In: The American Economic Review 104 (10), pp. 3222-3255.

Orazbayev, Sultan (2017a). “International knowledge flows and the administrative barriers to mobility”. UCL SSEES working paper 2017/1.

Orazbayev, Sultan (2017b). “Reconstructing international stocks and flows of stu dents and high-skilled workers from ORCID biographies”. mimeo.

Pisati, Maurizio (2008). “SPMAP: Stata module to visualize spatial data”. Mimeo.

Saxenian, AnnaLee (2005). “From brain drain to brain circulation: Transnational communities and regional upgrading in India and China”. In: Studies in comparative international development 40 (2), pp. 35-61.

Stark, Oded (2004). “Rethinking the brain drain”. In: World Development 32 (1), pp. 15-22.

Stephan, Paula, Chiara Franzoni, and Giuseppe Scellato (2016). “Global competition for scientific talent: evidence from location decisions of PhDs and postdocs in 16 countries”. In: Industrial and Corporate Change 25 (3), pp. 457-485. Zweig, David (2006). “Competing for talent: China's strategies to reverse the brain drain”. In: International Labour Review 145 (1-2), pp. 65-90.