International migration by educational attainment, 1990-2000

For the last few years, the pace of international migration has accelerated. According to the United Nations (2002), the number of international migrants increased from 154 million to 175 million between 1990 and 2000. The consequences for countries of origin and destination have attracted the increased attention of policymakers, scientists, and international agencies. The phenomenon is likely to further develop in the coming decades as a part of the world globalization process. The international community must be prepared to address the challenges raised by the increasing mobility of workers. In particular, the migration of skilled workers (the so-called brain drain) is a major piece of the migration debate. The transfer of human resources has undergone extensive scrutiny in developing countries but also in such industrial countries as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany, where an important fraction of talented natives is working abroad. When considering the consequences for countries of origin, early literature supports the view that skilled migration is unambiguously detrimental for those left behind (Grubel and Scott 1966; Johnson 1967; Bhagwati and Hamada 1974; Kwok and Leland 1982). This is the case if the migrants’ contribution to the economy is greater than their marginal product or if the education of skilled emigrants was partly funded by taxes on residents. The negative effects of the brain drain for source countries have been reformulated in an endogenous growth framework (Miyagiwa 1991; Haque and Kim 1995; Wong and Yip 1999). More recently, the effects of migration prospects on human capital formation have been the focus of several studies, which suggest that such prospects may in fact foster human capital