Mon 24 Oct 2005
A recent NYTimes article addressed the issue of educated people from poor contries migrating to seek opportunities in more affluent countries. It would be interesting to see if anyone has done a Bangladesh specific study on this.
Educated Workers Leaving Poor Nations, Survey Finds
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Poor countries across Africa, Central America and the Caribbean are losing sometimes staggering numbers of their college-educated workers to wealthy, industrialized democracies, according to a World Bank study made public today.
Its conclusions are based on a far-reaching survey of census and other data from the 30 countries that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which counts most of the world’s richest nations among its members.
Researchers found, for example, that a quarter to almost half of the college-educated nationals of Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda, Nicaragua and El Salvador live in member countries. For Haiti and Jamaica, the number rises to more than 80 percent.
In contrast, less than 5 percent of the skilled nationals of the great behemoths of the developing world - India, China, Indonesia and Brazil - live in a member country.
The World Bank’s study is part of a broader intellectual ferment about the role that migration plays in the development of poor countries. Scholarly research has tended to focus more on the impact of foreign aid, global trade and foreign investment, but there is a growing sense that the movement of people is also a major and little-understood factor.
The bank’s book published today, “International Migration, Remittances & the Brain Drain,” also presents an analysis of the impact of the money that migrants from Guatemala, Mexico and the Philippines send home, typically to their families.
This flow of money, known as remittances, helped reduce poverty in those three countries, household survey data showed. In Guatemala, rural families receiving the money spent more on education and less on consumption.
