A Gap in Brain Gain for Emerging Countries: Evidence of International Immigration on Non-Resident Patents

Bolortuya Enkhtaivan, Jorge Brusa and Zagdbazar Davaadorj
Additional contact information
Bolortuya Enkhtaivan: Haworth College of Business, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA
Jorge Brusa: A. R. Sanchez, Jr. School of Business, Texas A&M International University, Laredo, TX 78041, USA
Zagdbazar Davaadorj: College of Business, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA

JRFM, 2020, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-23

Abstract: Immigration is a controversial topic that draws much debate. From a human sustainability perspective, immigration is disadvantageous for home countries causing brain drains. Ample evidence suggests the developed host countries benefit from immigration in terms of diversification, culture, learning, and brain gains, yet less is understood for emerging countries. The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence of brain gains due to immigration for emerging countries, and explore any gaps as compared to developed countries. Using global data from 88 host and 109 home countries over the period from 1995 to 2015, we find significant brain gains due to immigration for emerging countries. However, our results show that there is still a significant brain gain gap between emerging and developed countries. A brain gain to the developed host countries is about 5.5 times greater than that of the emerging countries. The results hold after addressing endogeneity, self-selection, and large sample biases. Furthermore, brain gain is heterogenous by immigrant types. Skilled or creative immigrants tend to benefit the host countries about three times greater than the other immigrants. In addition, the Top 10 destination countries seem to attract the most creative people, thus harvest the most out of the talented immigrants. In contrast, we find countries of origin other than the Top 10 seem to send these creative people to the rest of the world.

Keywords: economic impact of immigration; emerging countries; innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C E F2 F3 G (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/14/1/7/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/14/1/7/ (text/html)

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:gam:jjrfmx:v:14:y:2020:i:1:p:7-:d:467982

Access Statistics for this article

JRFM is currently edited by Ms. Chelthy Cheng

More articles in JRFM from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().