Brain Drain or Brain Gain?Micro Evidence from an African Success Story

Catia Batista, Pedro Vicente and Aitor Lacuesta

No 343, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: Does emigration really drain human capital accumulation in origin countries? This paper explores a unique household survey designed and conducted to answer this specific question for the case of Cape Verde - the sub-Saharan African country with the largest fraction of tertiary-educated population living abroad, despite also having a fast-growing stock of human capital. Unlike previous literature, the ideal characteristics of our tailored survey allow us to explicitly test brain gain arguments according to which the possibility of own future emigration positively contributes to educational attainment in the origin country. In particular, we introduce a new method to estimate this effect by using full histories of current and return migrants (which enable controlling for migrant selection on unobservables), and a new set of exclusion restrictions both at the regional and household levels. Our results are robust to the inclusion of controls for remittances, family disruption, and general equilibrium effects of emigration. In constructing a counterfactual distribution of skills to answer our research question, we combine the survey data with information from censuses of the destination countries to account for the characteristics of the labour force that is (permanent and temporarily) lost due to emigration. Our results point to commonly used brain drain figures to be significantly exaggerated, whereas there may be substantial brain gains from allowing free migration and encouraging return migration.

Keywords: Brain Drain; Brain Gain; International Migration; Human Capital; Effects of Emigration in Origin Countries; Household Survey; Cape Verde; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J24 O15 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-dev, nep-edu, nep-hrm and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:8fee954c-00eb-4cc9-a53a-58856a22c0d5 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Micro Evidence from an African Success Story (2007)
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:oxf:wpaper:343

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).