Australia a winner in war for talent, highlighting brain drain issue

The world’s highly-skilled immigrants increasingly live in just four nations. Which countries made the cut?

Perth, where 60 per cent of doctors were foreign-born in 2010.

The world’s highly-skilled immigrants are increasingly living in just four nations: Australia, the US, UK and Canada, according to new World Bank research highlighting the challenges of brain drain for non-English-speaking and developing countries.

Falling transport costs combined with growing competition for talented workers have seen the ranks of highly skilled immigrant workers living in a group of mostly advanced nations (members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) swell 130 per cent to 28 million over the two decades to 2010, with the number from non- OECD (typically poorer) countries surging 185 per cent to 17.6 million.

The rise has come despite a dramatic fall in the cost of communication, suggesting the salience of other factors such as wage and cultural differences, the demands of multinational companies or the appeal of living close to other talented workers.

“The weight of the evidence points to high-skilled immigrants boosting innovation and productivity — mainly through the increased quantity of skilled individuals pursuing innovative work,” the authors said.

“The high-skilled members of the next generation appear to be less tied to any particular location or national identity, but instead have mentalities and connections that are much more global in nature,” they added, noting a remarkable surge in migration of high-skilled women. The number of highly skilled female immigrants in the OECD rose 150 per cent to 14.4 million between 1990 and 2010. “Africa and Asia experienced the largest growth of high-skilled female emigration, indicating the potential role of gender inequalities and labour market challenges in origin countries as push factors,” the study said.

“Losing highly educated, open-minded women is a problem” for these countries,” said World Bank economist Caglar Ozden, one of the authors, in an interview. “Mothers have the most impact on the development of their children, the fertility rate, the level of civility in a society.”

While the share of the world’s population living outside their birth country has hovered around 3 per cent since the 1960s, the highly-skilled component — defined as workers with at least one year of tertiary education — has risen more than three times as fast as the number of low-skilled immigrant workers. And China, India and Philippines have edged out the UK as the biggest supplier.

Despite efforts of non-English-speaking nations to attract high quality workers, almost 75 per cent of the total OECD highly skilled workforce in 2010 lived in the four main Anglo-Saxon countries — almost 40 per cent in the US alone. Around 70 per cent of engineers in Silicon Valley and 60 per cent of doctors in Perth, Australia, were foreign-born in 2010.

“The US has received an enormous net surplus of inventors from abroad, while China and India have been major source countries,” the study noted. In the last third of the 20 century, for instance, immigrants won 31 per cent of all Nobel prizes — of whom more than half of these were at US institutions.

It’s not clear whether these trends will continue. Rising standards of living in developing countries will curb the appeal of emigrating, but the “agglomeration benefits” of having talented individuals located in particular geographic locations — whether Silicon Valley on California, New York or London — look set to remain. “The huge concentration of actors and actresses in Hollywood only heightens the migration of aspiring talent to it, especially for the very talented,” the authors said.

In the meantime, governments will attempt to control the flow, typically employing a points-based system such as Australia and Canada use, permitting entry of workers based on their particular skills and backgrounds, or a decentralised system that lets employers pick which workers they want to sponsor, as the US uses.

The formal restraints might be less effective than they seem, however. “Many talented motivated individuals often find their way to the countries they want to move to, even if it means marrying an American,” the authors noted, citing themselves as examples.

Wall Street Journal