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Debates on the extent to which developing countries suffer from a brain drain often focus on the emigration of locally scarce health personnel. In this paper, we empirically examine how two potential determinants—aid for health and local income levels—affect the emigration rates of doctors and nurses from developing countries. Employing a standard gravity model of international migration, we show that aid for health has a negative effect on the emigration of both nurses and doctors. Our findings suggest that donors influence the emigration decisions of doctors and nurses through improvements in health infrastructure. Higher income per capita is also associated with lower emigration from developing countries for doctors and nurses alike. Given that nurses typically belong to the poorer segments of populations in the countries of origin, we can conclude that even at low initial income levels, on balance, economic growth provides an incentive to stay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emigrants moving from poor to rich countries experience large income gains on average. These gains are further augmented by remittances that allow a portion of the gains to be spent at lower sending-country prices. Taking advantage of recently available estimates of emigration-related income gains, this paper estimates the direct impact of international migration on the world income distribution. We find that international migration raises world income per person by just under 1 per cent, while it raises the incomes of those born in developing countries by approximately 2¼ per cent relative to the no-migration benchmark. Allowing for the remittance price effect augments these gains by about half. International migration also decreases the between-country component of world inequality (as measured by the between-country Theil coefficient) by about 2 per cent. While these aggregate income gains are significant, even small ‘brain-drain’ related adverse growth effects could quickly swamp the direct gains to migrants where rich-country immigration policies have a strong skill bias. A surer route to realising the potential of migration to increase world welfare would be to expand emigration opportunities for the less skilled. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article assesses the impact of international teacher migration on developing countries, based on a project covering Botswana, England, Jamaica and South Africa. It draws upon fieldwork conducted in 2003, including surveys of schools, migrant teachers and trainee teachers. The article estimates the extent of the movements and argues that they are largely transitional. The salary gains from migration are reported, along with estimates of the costs to sending countries in terms of training subsidies. International recruitment is not found to lead to harmful shortages of teachers in Jamaica and South Africa, but may ‘cream off’ the more effective teachers. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]