Brain Drain, Educational Quality and Immigration Policy: Impact on Productive Human Capital in Source and Host Countries, with Canada as a Case Study

Maurice Schiff

No 7955, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: With the 1967 reform, Canada's immigration policy changed from a country-preference system to a points system. The latter provides points according to applicants' education level but abstracts from the quality of their education. This paper considers the points system, the country-preference system, as well as a system that includes both educational quantity and quality and is termed the "?2 points system." It focuses on the policies' impact on immigrants' average productive human capital – the product of educational quality and quantity – or skill level, ?? (for policy ?). It shows, among others, that i) ?? is greater under the ?2 system than under the points system (?? > ??); ii) a switch from a points system to a ?2 system results in a human capital gain or net brain gain for Country 1 (the high-education quality country) and a loss or net brain drain for Country 2; iii) ?? is greater under the country-preference system than under the points system (?? > ??); iv) whether ?? is greater under ?2 or the country-preference system is ambiguous, with ?? >(

Keywords: points system; country-preference system; education quantity-quality system; Canadian immigration policy; human capital impact (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2014-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-int and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7955.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7955

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().