DO THE BEST GRADUATES LEAVE THE PERIPHERAL AREAS OF THE NETHERLANDS?

Viktor Venhorst, Jouke van Dijk and Leo van Wissen

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 2010, vol. 101, issue 5, 521-537

Abstract: There is more and more empirical evidence to show that highly skilled people are an important determinant of economic growth. Consequently, policy-makers are eager to keep their graduates in the region or attract graduates from elsewhere. It is also well known that people with a higher level of education exhibit high rates of spatial mobility. Much less is known about mobility patterns according to discipline and academic grade. Do the best people stay or leave, and does this vary according to discipline and type of region? This paper investigates the relationship between ability, field of study and spatial mobility using a micro‐dataset on Dutch university and college graduates. The findings indicate that there are substantial net flows mainly towards the economic centre of the Netherlands, but that there are also flows between peripheral regions and to other countries. The paper finds that university graduates are more spatially mobile than vocational college level graduates and that when one looks at spatial behaviour according to discipline, there are also striking differences between graduates. This, however, does not necessarily mean that peripheral regions also lose their best graduates. For several disciplines, employers in the peripheral areas are able to retain the graduates with the highest grades, contrary to what the standard human capital framework predicts. However, the study finds that if graduates leave the region, those with the highest grades are more likely to move abroad.

Keywords: Migration; higher educated graduates; human capital; the Netherlands; periphery; multinominal logit (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (44)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2010.00629.x

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:bla:tvecsg:v:101:y:2010:i:5:p:521-537

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0040-747X

Access Statistics for this article

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie is currently edited by Jan van Weesep

More articles in Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie from Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().