Externe Monographien
Mory Charles Clark
2022,
This thesis assesses the potential effects of migration on the sending country, focusing on the impacts of migration on human capital stocks and human capital formation. Over the last century, the number of global migrants has increased substantially. The size of this migration and the skills make-up of those migrating is likely to have wide reaching economic impacts on not just the countries where migrants are arriving but also the countries they are leaving. As much of this migration is from lesser developed countries (LDC), it is vital to see how this flow of people might affect human capital levels and ultimately their economic growth. The first chapter in this thesis will explore the current literature surrounding the indirect impacts of migration, reviewing, and critically analysing how migration affects the sending countries of migrants and proposing potential avenues for future analysis when data becomes available. As the impacts of migration are too numerous to address in one study alone, this chapter will focus on two key areas of migration research, remittances and return migration. The chapter ties together a wide range of economic analysis addressing theoretical, micro-data and macro applied econometric studies, drawing on diverse evidence sources to create an overarching understanding of what potential benefits may occur from emigration and how these effects might be negated by potential costs. When reviewing and evaluating the impacts of return migration, the analysis begins by looking at who re-emigrates and how this drives the effects of return migration on physical and human capital as well as the impacts on demography and the spread of skills and growth inducing social norms. The second half of this analysis looks at the impact of remittances, laying out the econometric issues associated with their analysis then focusing on their effect on capital accumulation as well as their impact on economic development generally. Finally, this chapter proposes potential natural experiments made available by the UK’s introduction of temporary refugee status, which might be able to tackle the potential econometric issues. While the literature shows a clear impact of potential benefits of migration for the sending country, this chapter demonstrates these impacts are rarely universal and tend to occur with trade-offs. Throughout this critical review, potential avenues for future research are presented and assessed, including the suggested data that is currently not available. The Second chapter of this thesis looks at the possible impacts of high skilled emigration on the reduction or the accumulation of human capital in the next period (brain drain and brain gain respectively) in the sending country. We use panel data from 132 countries between 1990 and 2010 (at 5-year intervals), allowing us to control for unobserved heterogeneity and the implementation of Difference GMM allows us to deal with issues of endogeneity. Moreover, this study takes advantage of relatively new data to go further in assessing this question than previous attempts by looking at the impacts of changing intensities of migration for a given education level on different levels of educational attainment in the sending country. We find that an increase in high skilled emigration rates increases the share of population with tertiary education but has little impact on the share of the population with primary or secondary education levels giving evidence for incentive-based brain gain. Moreover, this analysis looks at not just one income group of countries but compares the potential brain gain effect across high-, middle- and low-income countries. We see that the brain gain effect dominates in low- and middle-income countries while having a far smaller effect in high income countries. These results are robust to different measures of human capital and still hold even when controlling for education expenditure, GDP per capita, life expectancy and initial levels of human capital. Therefore, this study provides some evidence for brain gain, building on previous studies and goes further in showing that while an increase in high-skilled migration leads to greater human capital accumulation in low- and middle-income countries, an increase in low-skilled migration leads to a decrease in the share of the population with higher levels of education thus providing potential policy implications for lower- and middle-income countries. The final chapter of this thesis investigates the drivers of student migration and contrasts these to what previous literature has evidenced as the drivers of economic migration. Student migrants make up the second largest share of migration after economic migrants and are growing fast in number. Moreover, student migrants have been shown to be a method by which skills and knowledge are shared from host countries to sending countries. Determining the drivers of economic migration may shed an important light on what socio-economic factors drive student migration decisions and compare these findings to the drivers of economic migration. Building on the link between human capital accumulation and migration shown by the literature, this chapter attempts to see what the causes of student migration are and considers whether these are in line with the determinants of economic migration. Moreover, it specifically looks at the economic drivers of student migration to assess whether these determine student migration. We use macro-panel data to analyse this question, using bilateral data for 65 sending countries and 42 receiving countries between the years 2011 and 2017. This dataset covers a larger scope than previous studies in this area and allows for greater comparison to economic migration. The use of this panel data allows for omitted variable bias of unobserved variables to be controlled for. Furthermore, the use of destination by time fixed effects controls for multilateral resistance to migration, a problem that is not addressed in the current literature. Moreover, the use of Pseudo Poisson Maximum Likelihood estimator allows for the inclusion of zero dependent values, the exclusion of which would bias the results. We find when comparing these results to the previous literature, students tend to migrate for the same reasons as economic migrants and while student specific factors such as a country’s university quality have a positive impact on students’ migration decisions these impacts become lose their statistically significant once economic integration between the sending and receiving countries are considered. Therefore, student migration may represent another potential channel for brain drain for a developing country.