Brain drain vs. brain gain
Poor material conditions force lots of people to migrate every day. They leave their homes and cross the borders to migrate to new places with better job prospects and higher wages, necessary to lead a decent and better life.
Movements within labour markets in the age of globalization are directed mostly abroad. Young people leave their countries of origin and migrate to host countries. These flows of labor result in two phenomena – brain drain and brain gain.
The brain drain takes place in country of origin, which experiences the loss of well-educated labour and intelligence. Brain drain is one of the major concerns of many countries. Various approaches are being tried by governments to mitigate the potential negative effects of skilled emigration on countries of origin, focusing on prevention, compensation mechanization, or mobilization of the diaspora as a development tool.
Brain gain. is the benefit to the host country or the country of origin, if the former migrants return home. Thus people who gain education in their own countries exploit their skills and knowledge in host countries, contributing to its development.
Flow of money and skills and its influence on national income
Migration affects development since immigrants generate the flows of capital back to their homelands in the form of remittances. It is very difficult to measure the amount of transferred and available data relate only to the cash transfers done through official channels. It is suspected that much more money is sent through many unofficial channels or brought or send back home (also in the form of goods).
International remittances are of the greatest importance for the economy since internal remittances have no effect on the money growth within the country.
The global financial crisis of 2008 has exposed migrant workers to new vulnerabilities. They are disproportionately young, unskilled, and employed in the worst-hit sectors, such as construction and manufacturing.[3]
Flows of skills are also a form of remittances, obviously not possible to be measured but skills still constitute an important part of remittances.
Due to migration of skilled, expert and trained manpower from the country, there is decline in the total national income of the country. However due to remittances the National income can substantially increase.
Individual remittances use – advantages and disadvantages
It is important what people individually do with their remittances, since the way they spend the money can have both negative and positive effects.
Saving remittances and investing money is beneficial for development.
Only consumption purpose can lead to increase in import, decrease in foreign exchange and can be negative for development.
It can turn into a positive process, when the considerable consumption intensified by higher income stimulates demand for local production and services, thus generating the employment.
Negative thing is that people receiving remittances can easily become dependent on migrants who earn money abroad. It can also happen, that economic flows don’t really lead to investments but more to stagnation (according to AIV document).
Entrepreneurs and Tourism
Some of the emigrants become entrepreneurs in the host countries, what fosters investments in the countries of origin. Keeping businesses abroad contributes to development of homeland. It’s stated that transnational enterprise not only improves development but also affects social and cultural spheres and is often inspired by these purposes.
Tourism is also a form of migration, but short-term, also contributing to development. In the country of origin travel agencies prosper, enabling people to travel abroad. Simultaneously countries which people travel to, make money serving tourists, through providing hotels, restaurants and many other attractions. Often prior immigrants start touristic entrepreneurships according to their own culture to attract people from their country.
Innovative Immigrant Entrepreneurs
Immigrant entrepreneurs have made great contributions to innovations leading to economic growth. The high performance of immigrants in innovative endeavors has positively contributed to the overall prosperity of native-born Americans and economic growth[4]
These immigrant entrepreneurs tend to start businesses in the highly innovative technology and science fields. The contributions of entrepreneurs to business startup across industries reflects a higher rate of startups among immigrants in the fields of engineering, business, investment, and electronics.[6]
Offshoring and outsourcing
Offshoring
Big companies trying to reduce costs relocate their business processes partly or entirely to the countries where costs of operation are lower and low-paid labour is available. More often companies have main factories in Asian countries, where massive production for relatively small money is possible. Recently the main countries of destination for production offshoring is China and India. The new emerging destination is nowadays Philippines.
Outsourcing
It is similar process, although it means more relocation of internal production processes to another company, within the same country.
Impact of growing IT sector
During the past 15-20 years, the growing IT sector impacted the mobility of labour significantly. Workers from the developing countries like
India, China in the IT sector get migrated to developed countries like USA, Germany, UK, due to their work profile.
Enormous potential
Labour migration can represent an enormous potential for countries at both ends of migration spectrum. For countries of origin, it can provide a form of development support, especially through remittances, transfer of technical knowhow and creation of business and trade networks. Immigration can remove labour scarcity, facilitate occupational mobility the and add to the human capital stock of the receiving countries. In the context of demographic changes, it can help developed countries
Pressure on government to modify migration laws
While the liberalization of international flow of goods, cpital and information is well under way, progress towards the free movement of persons is harder to achieve. Despite this fact, differences in employment opportunities and living standards between countries, increased education and broader access to information on living conditions and employment opportunities abroad, as well as established inter-country networks based on family, culture and history will ensure that labour migration continues, and indeed increases.
CONCLUSION
Paralleling the growth of India’s economy has been the concomitant increase in India’s global engagement. While this has been most manifest in the growth of trade and financial flows, the movement of people has also become more important. Since the 1830s, international migration from India under British rule comprised largely of unskilled workers from poorer socio-economic groups who went to other colonized countries. Between 1834 and 1937, nearly 30 million people left India and nearly four-fifths returned. Post-Independence, migrants came from richer socio-economic groups, from wealthier parts of the country and, with the exception of the large migration to the Middle East, went industrialized.
The migrant stream to the United States in particular has been the most highly educated, both compared to other immigrants into the US, as well as to other Indian migrant streams abroad. Since the 1990s, increasing numbers of skilled emigrants from India have also been moving to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Singapore.
The economic impact of international migration on India has been primarily shaped by two key channels — financial and human capital. The oil boom-induced Gulf migration in the early 1970s is when efforts at attracting inflows from Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) began. Since then financial remittance has emerged as an important part of India’s balance of payments. Remittances were virtually negligible in 1970, rose to $2.8 billion in 1980, stagnated during the 1980s and even dropped slightly to $2.4 billion in 1990. Since then they have climbed steeply to $11.1 billion in 1999 and over $50 billion — nearly 5 percent of GDP — in 2009.
Paralleling the inflows of remittances have been NRI inflows in the capital account. Although schemes to attract the latter were introduced in 1970, a decade later deposits barely exceeded one billion dollars. During the 1980s, while remittances languished, deposits accelerated. Following the onset of the 1991 reforms NRI deposits grew rapidly accounting for nearly 10 percent ($37 billion) of the accretion to India’s foreign exchange reserves in the last two decades.
This spurt has in part been due to the rapid growth in the stock of India citizens residing abroad, the degree to which their earning power has increased and policy changes including liberalization of the foreign exchange regime and gold imports (with the latter resulting in bringing remittances from the Middle East through official channels, rather than hawala markets), and of course India’s much better growth prospects.
In contrast to the large inflows in the current account and banking deposits in the capital account, NRI-FDI has been remarkably limited in part because of an unfavorable policy regime that penalizes NRIs from remitting the gains from FDI.
In addition to the obvious positive impact for recipient households, financial remittances have had considerable systemic effects on India’s balance of payments, allowing much greater trade deficits than would otherwise have been possible, stabilizing the rupee exchange rate and thereby giving India’s central bank greater monetary policy autonomy.
These inflows have been much more important for some states than others. The most obvious case is Kerala where remittances account for about a quarter of state net domestic product with wide ranging economic and social consequences. Given Kerala’s political economy, it is not surprising that most of this money fuelled a consumption boom (with no investments in manufacturing) and the resulting demand has driven growth in the service sector, most of which (such as construction) are non-tradeables. Recently however, these inflows have fuelled investments in the hospitality industry and a mushrooming of private institutions in health care and education.
A second channel through which international migration has affected India is its human capital. The effects of skilled migration have been ambiguous. On the positive side, the success of India migrants overseas has been good for India’s reputation. In addition, this segment of the diaspora has woven a web of cross-national networks, thereby facilitating the flow of tacit information, commercial and business ideas, and technologies into India. It has also facilitated “home sourcing”, as exemplified by the rapid growth of India’s diamond cutting and polishing industry. The Indian diaspora has also had important trade enhancing and investment effects.
On the other hand, the loss of significant numbers of the highly skilled has undoubtedly had negative effects as well, perhaps most manifest in reducing the supply of professionals with the managerial and technical capabilities to run institutions and organizations, be they colleges or hospitals, statistical systems or research laboratories. A prime example of these adverse effects can be seen in India’s higher education system. When the IITs and IIMs, as well as new science and technology research institutes were set up in the 1950s and 1960s many of the key personnel in these institutions were trained abroad and returned to India, inspired by the heady days of “nation building.”
But by the late 1960s, more and more of India’s best and brightest began to go abroad, never to return. The small number who did were sufficient to maintain the high standards of a small number of institutions, but not their expansion, and the number of graduates from these elite institutions remained virtually unchanged for four decades.
Meanwhile, the replenishment of talent in universities and research institutes began to decline as fewer returned. Finally, when return migration picked up at the turn of the century, few saw public institutions as a viable career alternative. This has been an important reason why Indian universities (virtually all public) have deteriorated. As mediocrity has become entrenched, it has become even more impervious to change.
While there are many complex reasons for the travails of Indian higher education, these have been amplified by the manner in which the system has been a net exporter of talent. Any system that hemorrhages talent over the long run will struggle to survive, let alone prosper. There have been considerable cognitive effects as well. A stark example is the state of West Bengal, where three decades of communist rule has so politicized its institutions of higher education that the large number of excellent researchers from this state can be found all over the world, except in West Bengal.
The benefits — or costs — of international migration will depend largely on India’s domestic policies and politics rather than something intrinsic to this specific mechanism of globalization. Whether the India diaspora will lobby for the country of origin in foreign capitals or instead help raise funds for separatist movements, whether the “brain-drain” becomes a “brain-gain”, whether they invest in factories in the country of origin or one-way tickets for their compatriots to leave the country of origin, will by and large depend on what happens in India. It must be remembered that citizens leave their country for a reason. And when they leave, the factors that led them to leave do not disappear. How these factors are addressed will fundamentally shape migration’s effects on India.