'Brain drain' hurting poor nations

Poor countries across Africa, Central America and the Caribbean are losing sometimes staggering portions of their college-educated workers to wealthy democracies, according to a World Bank study released Tuesday.

The study's findings document a troubling pattern of "brain drain" — the flight of skilled, middle-class workers who could help lift their countries out of poverty, some analysts say. And while the exact effect of such migration is still little understood, there is a growing sense among economists that it plays a crucial role in a country's development.

The findings are based on an extensive survey of census and other data from the 30 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which includes most of the world's richest nations.

The study found that from a quarter to almost half of the college-educated nationals of poor countries like Ghana, Mozambique, Kenya, Uganda and El Salvador live abroad in an OECD country — a fraction that rises to more than 80 percent for Haiti and Jamaica.

In contrast, less than 5 percent of the skilled nationals of the powerhouses of the developing world, like India, China, Indonesia and Brazil, live abroad in an OECD country.

These patterns suggest that an extensive flight of educated people is damaging many small to medium-sized poor countries, while the largest developing countries are better able to weather relatively smaller losses of talent — and even benefit from them when their skilled workers return or invest in their native lands, said Frederic Docquier, a lead researcher for the bank and an economist at the University of Lovain in Belgium.

"For a country with a third of its graduates missing, one has to worry," said Alan Winters, director of the World Bank's development research group.

The World Bank study, published Tuesday in a book with the title "International Migration, Remittances & the Brain Drain," also presents an analysis of the effect of the money that migrants from Guatemala, Mexico and the Philippines sent home, typically to their families.

This flow of money, known as remittances, helped reduce poverty in those three countries and was a major source of foreign exchange, but the broader implications were complex. In Guatemala, for example, rural families receiving the money spent more on education and less on consumption. But in Mexico, children in migrant families actually got less education than those of non-migrants.

Some of the bank's data on brain drain have brought debate. Mark Rosenzweig, a Yale University economist, argues that the bank's measurement of the phenomenon is inflated because it does not exclude immigrants who moved to a rich country as children, or who got their college educations there.