The contingent nature of brain gain and brain circulation: their foreign context and the impact of return scientists on the scientific community in their country of origin

The recent literature on high skilled labor migration has taken a turn from analyzing processes of ‘brain drain’ to processes of ‘brain gain’ and ‘brain circulation’. Returning scientists, having been affiliated to foreign institutes, are able to facilitate knowledge exchanges between the two locations, and facilitate the linkage of the national scientific community to international scientific cooperation projects. In this way, return scientists can have a disproportionate impact on the development of the scientific community in their country of origin. However, not all flows of return migrants have had such a positive impact. Returnees failed to affect developments in some localities, while producing ambiguous effects in others. These studies typically argue that the impact of return migrants is dependent on the absorptive capacity and the local social, cultural, and institutional context in the country of origin. Using data on return migrants within the Taiwanese economic academic community, this paper seeks to add to this literature by arguing that the impact of return migrants is not only dependent on the circumstances in their country of origin, but is also contingent on the nature and quality of the context in which they acquired their international labor experience. Skills and access to knowledge networks are heterogeneously spread over geographical space, so that the context in which a return migrant acquired his or her international labor experience matters.