The Great Healthcare Robbery (LA Times)

March 6, 2008

The Los Angeles Times cites CGD researcher Michael Clemens' work on health  professional emigration.

From the article:

"Before we pull out the handcuffs, we might pause to look at some research. Last year, Michael Clemens, a research fellow and Harvard-trained economist at the Center for Global Development, collected data on African-born health workers in the nine most popular destination countries, including the United States and Britain. He then checked the numbers against World Health Organization estimates of the numbers of doctors and nurses who work in each African country. To his surprise, he found a high correlation between the number of doctors per capita working within a country and the number of emigrants from that country working abroad. In other words, those African countries that had sent the most workers abroad also had more healthcare workers back home. Nothing in the data links even massive out-migration of physicians to child mortality."