Selective immigration policies, human capital accumulation and migration duration in infinite horizon

Francesco Magris and Giuseppe Russo

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: An increasing literature encourages the use of selective immigration policies as a tool to promote incentives to education. It is argued that, since not everybody is allowed to migrate, under these policies a poor country may well turn out with more human capital than in autarchy. The implicit assumption is that migrations are permanent. However, this assumption has recently been dropped: a large literature studies the optimal migration duration in an intertemporal framework. In our work we study how selective immigration policies affect the human capital accumulation and the migration duration. Unlike most of the existing literature, the probability of entering abroad is endogenous and our analisys is not limited to two periods: there is no reason to consider a single migration spell, and our infinite-horizon model includes an aggregate shock as a source of constrained migration. Contrary to the "brain gain with a brain drain" reasoning, we show that selective policies may be harmful for human capital accumulation. As a consequence, their effectiveness is questionable, and they may produce a "brain loss" rather than a brain gain. Besides, borders closure backfires on migration duration especially for unskilled workers.

Keywords: return migration; human capital; brain drain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-09
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00590772v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00590772v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Selective immigration policies, human capital accumulation and migration duration in infinite horizon (2009)
Working Paper: Selective immigration policies, human capital accumulation and migration duration in infinite horizon (2009)
Working Paper: Selective Immigration Policies, Human Capital Accumulation and Migration Duration in Infinite Horizon (2005)
Working Paper: Selective immigration policies, human capital accumulation and migration duration in infinite horizon (2005)
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:hal:wpaper:halshs-00590772

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().