The migration of academics has an obvious impact on innovation and the flow of knowledge across borders. Research from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) explores the scale of the impact.
The team started by creating a database that tracks the number of academics who frequently publish papers and the migration flow and rates of all countries that have such academics. This was accomplished by utilizing the metadata from over 36 million journal articles and reviews published from 1996 to 2021, found in the Scopus bibliographic database.
“We used the metadata of the article title, name of the authors and affiliations of almost every article and review published in Scopus since 1996,” the researchers explain. “We followed every single one of the roughly 17 million researchers listed in the bibliographic database through the years and noticed changes in affiliation and, by using that tactic we know how many academics left a given country every year.”
Impact on economic development
The researchers’ examination concentrated on the connection between emigration and economic growth, revealing that academic migration patterns may diverge greatly from overall migration patterns.
Earlier studies have demonstrated that as low-income nations prosper, their overall emigration rates initially rise, then slow and eventually decrease. This implies that prioritizing economic growth paradoxically leads to a temporary increase in migration from low and middle-income countries, instead of a reduction.
The findings of the researchers reveal a contrasting pattern for academics in low and middle-income countries. As their gross domestic product (GDP) per capita rises, their emigration rates decrease. However, once the GDP reaches around 25,000 US dollars, the trend switches and the likelihood of emigration increases as the countries grow wealthier.
“Academics are a crucial group of innovators whose work has relevant economic effects. We showed that their propensity to emigrate does not immediately increase with economic development—indeed it decreases until a high-income turning point and then increases,” the researchers conclude. “This implies that increasing economic development does not necessarily lead to an academic brain drain in low- and middle-income countries.”
