Highly skilled immigrants make a significant contribution to economic growth in host countries. In particular, they account for a significant share of all patents registered by developed countries.
For example, in the United States, about a fifth of patents issued in the period 2016-2020 included migrant inventors. Authors from McGill University and Princeton University, using American data for 1940-2000, showed that an increase in the share of immigrant college graduates by 1 percentage point leads to an increase in the per capita patent rate by 9-18%. The positive impact of migration on innovation is especially strong and rapid in countries that already have a large stock of patents, Indian economists noted.
Paradoxically, it can also benefit developing countries – “donors” of highly skilled migration due to the fact that it facilitates the transfer of technologies and management practices. Thus, IT engineers from China and India who worked in the USA contributed to the acceleration of the development of the IT industry in their home countries.
Given these multidirectional effects of the “brain drain,” many countries prefer not to limit highly skilled emigration, but to encourage those who have left to repatriate – such a policy allows them to receive all the benefits of skilled emigration. For example, in 2009, Korea launched the World Class University Project, and in Brazil, there are programs to attract both very young researchers and postdocs (those who have already received a PhD and would like to continue their academic career).
One of the largest programs to attract scientists from abroad is China’s Thousand Talents Plan, launched in 2009. Two years later, it was supplemented by the Thousand Young Talents Plan, a program focusing on young (under 40) scientists in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. The programs were aimed primarily at repatriating people from China, but not exclusively, and, by some estimates, attracted about 7,000 scientists to China over 10 years. In 2019, these initiatives were renamed the High-End Foreign Expert Recruitment Plan.
In a new study, Ning Jia and Belton Fleischer from China’s Central University of Finance and Economics analyzed the results of the Thousand Young Talents program as applied to mathematics departments at Chinese universities. The program, which attracted scientists who had received degrees from top universities abroad, led to an increase in scientific publications by Chinese mathematicians and an increase in the citation rate of their work. However, the results were distributed extremely unevenly: the country’s most prestigious universities mainly benefited. At the same time, mathematicians who were already working at universities (who had not left) began to publish less: a lack of collaboration with newcomers and increased competition for resources had an effect.