CGD's recent publication, Give us Your Best and Brightest, was cited in this article appearing in Australia's The Age newspaper. The article also cited a new report by the World Bank, assessing the effects of international migration and labor movements according to the two reports.
From the article:
Two new reports, one by the World Bank and one by Washington think tank the Centre for Global Development, conclude that it can be damaging. In the short term, it hurts countries' ability to deliver health, education and other services. In the long term, it takes away the natural leaders who would otherwise set up businesses, create institutions, spread ideas and promote reform, democracy and innovation.
The centre's report sums it up in its ironic title, Give Us Your Best and Brightest. Written by economists Devesh Kapur and John McHale, it highlights the short and long-term damage that countries can suffer when their doctors and nurses, teachers and researchers, engineers and knowledge workers leave home.
The long-term damage is that the best and brightest are no longer at home to be agents of change, drivers of growth, innovators, founders, and reformers. The authors quote historian Barrington Moore's dictum: "No bourgeoisie, no democracy."
