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Because mobility has been described as a key element of the academic habitus and a well‐established norm in scientific life, people moving within academia have been generally considered to be "knowledge migrants" and "talent migrants." Indeed, the literature rarely takes a labour market perspective when analysing academic mobility. However, Southern European academia is largely characterised by challenging working conditions, low wages, and a lack of fair competition for positons, all of which negatively affecting job prospects. Based on 25 in‐depth interviews, this paper explores the reasons behind the migration of a group of Spanish and Italian academics in Mexico with a view to bringing into focus the role of economic/labour and career‐related reasons in migration decisions. We find that their experiences fall along three main academic trajectories, which are distinguished by the stage in the participants' careers at which they decided to migrate and the channels by which they entered Mexican academia. Common to all three groups is the identification of the economic crisis and a lack of institutional support as strong motivating factors in their decision. Underlying this is the question of whether the studied group is best viewed as "knowledge"/"talent" migrants who have followed certain institutional channels or "economic migrants" who are somehow pushed to work abroad by the lack of good employment in their countries of origin. The paper also challenges mainstream ideas about academic mobility, in the sense that the literature has not considered the attractive power of universities/research centres located in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate to what extent highly educated skilled Greek migrants are attracted to global cities. With the use of a novel database, we find that highly educated Greek migrants are attracted more to cities indexed as global than to cities that are not indexed as global. Moreover, the more the international indexes that list a city as global, the greater the number of such migrants this city receives; that is, these migrants prefer to live in those global cities that are considered to have the most attributes to be classified as such. We provide information on which specific cities these migrants live in, thus filling a gap in the relevant literature. Our data further support a well‐documented argument that there is a mutual beneficial relationship between skilled migrants and global cities to the extent that global cities create a favourable socio‐economic environment that attracts highly skilled migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development impacts of international scholarships for students from the Global South are most commonly understood through the expansion of human capital in the students' home countries for which the scholars' return analysed in this paper represents a key prerequisite. Utilising the theory of planned behaviour, this paper examines factors influencing the plans to return and actual postgraduation migration behaviour of 430 grantees of the Czech scholarship programme financed from the official development aid. One half of the current grantees reported plan to return, and only the 31% of alumni respondents actually returned suggesting a risk of brain drain. We found that economic integration rather than perceived sociocultural integration influences migration decision making of international students. We show how the propensity to return to scholars' home countries can be estimated from cross‐sectional data. A graphical path model was developed, which helps to understand drivers of postgraduate migration behaviour of international students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rural out‐migration of young people leads to problems such as "brain drain" and the overageing of the rural population. The purpose of this paper is to study return migration motives among students originating from rural areas. The case study relates to the province of Akmola, northern Kazakhstan. Based on data collected from college and university students (n = 357), a binary logistic regression model is used to identify rural return motives. Noneconomic and economic motives are equally important in forming a return intention. Our findings do not suggest that particularly underperforming students intend to return. As expected, compared with those in major cities, students who study in a regional town intend to return more often. We also found a large difference in return intentions along ethnic lines. Students of non‐Kazakh decent are much more likely to return than ethnic Kazakhs, and the two ethnic groups have quite distinct motives indicating signs of ethnic discrimination against non‐Kazakhs in the job market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The migration of highly educated population (brain drain) poses extremely significant impacts on origin countries' development, especially in cases in which, owing to their economic and social structures, these countries cannot promote the efficient allocation of their professionals. At the same time, the decision of those migrants to return home or remain abroad is affected by several factors. This paper aims to analyse this phenomenon by using primary data collected from Greece. Our findings indicate that it is not reasonable to expect that a large share of these people is likely to return, especially given the ongoing economic and social crises that further exacerbate the observed mismatch between supply and demand for a highly educated workforce in the country. These empirical results can assist the formulation of specific policy measures in order to reap the benefits of those individuals' presence abroad, which can undoubtedly enhance the developmental prospects of European countries. This study constitutes the first one on brain drain from Greece, while it is also the first study to compare highly skilled migrants who still work abroad to those who have returned. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Our study analyses connections between the economic and cultural capital of the families of international students, their study choices, and postgraduation returns. Thus far, research on brain drain has focused either on actual returns or on the intentions of students to return. Literature exploring the selectivity of international student mobility interpreted the middle class background of the students as a distinction strategy in a situation of expanding tertiary education in the source country. However, the connection between the cultural and economic capital of the student's family and postgraduation returns has not yet been analysed. Our results, based on a survey of parents of internationally mobile students from Slovakia, confirm the previously reported selectivity of international student mobility. Internationally mobile students come more often from families with a higher level of cultural capital. Moreover, students from families with high cultural capital have a higher probability of studying in more prestigious study destinations. The study destination is, however, not influenced by the economic capital of the family. We use structural equation modelling to describe the connection observed between cultural and economic capital and postgraduation returns. Although a high level of cultural capital increases the odds of nonreturn, a high level of economic capital increases the chance of postgraduation return. We suggest that such a “cultural capital drain” could have positive consequences on vertical labour market mobility in the source country. We discuss the connection between international student mobility and labour migration in the case of international students from low income families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the significance of migrant networks, organizations and workers to the financial performance of a developing country. Research shows that their financial remittances, knowledge and political ideas have important role in the development. It states that their financial remittances carry a huge potential in poverty reduction and local investment because these remittals are resistant or counter-cyclic to economic recession. It reveals that the amount of remissions transferred to developing countries which flow through official sanctioned channels such as banks or money transfer services have increased sharply and made authorities to conclude that costs and benefits changed with shift of ideas from "brain drain" in 1970s to "brain gain" in the 1990s.

The fertility behaviour of migrants is often studied by examining migrants and native nonmigrants in the country of destination. To understand the mechanisms for migrant fertility, it is important to know what distinguishes them from the population they originate from. The Ghanaian sample of the "Migrations between Africa and Europe" project allows us to contrast the fertility of those who never emigrated from Ghana and Ghanaian migrants who are residing in the UK or the Netherlands. First, we estimate discrete‐time hazard models of first birth to evaluate whether first birth timing is influenced by migration. Second, we apply Poisson regression techniques to examine differentials in completed fertility. We find that Ghanaian migrants postpone first childbirth compared with nonmigrants. Differences are largest at ages 20 to 24 for women and 20 to 29 for men. Ghana experiences a typical brain drain, which means that especially the highly skilled emigrate. In our sample, this is particularly true for women. Education seems to be an important determinant of the postponement of first childbirth in Ghana, although we cannot clearly attribute migrants' later first births to their higher level of education. However, our findings on completed fertility reveal that migrants have fewer children than nonmigrants and this difference diminishes considerably if we take into account their level of education. Apparently, migrants do not fully catch up after postponing first childbirth and end up with a lower number of children by the age of 40. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]