Skilled Emigration and Skill Creation: A quasi-experiment - Working Paper 152
Publication Info
Publication Type
Download
Initiative
Research Topics
CGD Expert
Articles
- Migration Talk: Making Sense of a World on the Move
- Migration and Development: Temporary Workers are Key
- Migration and Development: Q&A with Michael Clemens
Events
- Effects of Migration on Developing Countries: Explaining Labor Market Inactivity in Migrant-Sending Families
- Should I Stay or Should I Go: Geographic versus cultural networks in migration and (un)employment
- Internal Migration and Poverty Reduction in Tanzania: Evidence from a Long-Term Tracking Survey
- International Migration in the Long-Run: Positive Selection, Negative Selection and Policy
Multimedia
Rights and Permissions
We welcome the use of CGD work-just let us know in advance! For contact information see our Rights & Permissions page. CGD rights and permissions are managed under the terms of the Creative Commons license below.
Satish Chand and Michael Clemens
09/30/2008
Conventional wisdom holds that the emigration of highly-skilled workers depletes local human capital in developing countries. But when the very prospect of emigration induces people to invest more in their education, the effects are not so negative. In this paper, Satish Chand and CGD research fellow Michael Clemens analyze a unique natural quasi-experiment in the Republic of the Fiji Islands, where political shocks have provoked one of the largest recorded exoduses of skilled workers from a developing country.
Mass emigration began unexpectedly and has occurred only in a well-defined subset of the population, creating a treatment group that foresaw likely emigration and two different quasi-control groups that did not. The authors use rich census and administrative microdata to address a range of concerns about experimental validity. This allows plausible causal attribution of post-shock changes in human capital accumulation to changes in emigration patterns.
Chand and Clemens show that high rates of emigration by tertiary-educated Fiji Islanders not only raised investment in tertiary education in Fiji; they moreover raised the stock of tertiary-educated people in Fiji—net of departures.