Employing skilled expatriates: benchmarking skilled immigration regimes across economies

Dieter J De Smet

No 6708, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: The Employing Skilled Expatriates indicators analyze the skilled immigration regime relevant for foreign direct investment across 93 economies to provide comparable information about this regulatory space. The indicators focus on restrictions that control the inflow of skilled immigrants (quotas); the ease of hiring skilled expatriates (time and procedural steps to obtain a temporary work permit, existence of online application systems, availability of a one-stop shop and fast-tracking option); and the existence of a path to permanent residency and citizenship as well as the existence of spousal work permits. As governments increasingly seek to attract foreign direct investment as a driver of long-term development, reforming the investment climate -- including the skilled immigration regime -- is one policy option to consider. This analysis shows a positive correlation between the Employing Skilled Expatriates index and foreign direct investment inflows. As measured by the Employing Skilled Expatriates index, there is room for economies with a need for skilled workers to improve their immigration regimes as one means of attracting more foreign direct investment. In Singapore and the Republic of Korea, it only takes ten days on average to obtain a temporary work permit. In Honduras, the same process can take up to 22 weeks. The global average to obtain a temporary work permit is eight weeks. The process is the fastest in the East Asia and the Pacific region where it takes five weeks. With 11 weeks, the processing time in the Middle East and North Africa region isthe slowest.

Keywords: Climate Change Mitigation and Green House Gases; Technology Innovation; Technology Industry (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/416231468337869895/pdf/WPS6708.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:wbk:wbrwps:6708

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().