"Education, Economic Growth, and Brain Drain"

Kar-yiu Wong, University of Washington and Chinese University of Hong Kong
and
Chong-Kee Yip, Chinese University of Hong Kong

presented at the workshop on "Economic Growth in Open Economies," December 12-13, 1996, Hong Kong, and forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.


Asian homepage


conferences
on growth
and trade


Kar-yiu's
books


Kar-yiu's
working papers


Kar-yiu's
home page

Please click to view and download the paper. Alternatively, if you have difficulty in downloading the file, and would like to have a hard copy of it, please click here.

The paper is in .pdf format. To view and print it requires the program Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you do not have the program installed in your computer, you can download a free copy of it first.

Abstract


This paper constructs a two-sector overlapping-generations model of endogenous growth to study the effects of brain drain on growth, education and income distribution. The engine of growth is human capital accumulation through education and intergenerational spillover. Brain drain reduces both the economic growth rate and the wage rate of the unskilled, but raises the wage rate of the skilled. Brain drain, however, generally hurts the non-emigrants through the static income distributional effects and also the dynamic damage on economic growth and human capital accumulation. If the initial rate of human capital accumulation is relatively low, brain drain could deteriorate both the sum of discounted income and lifetime discounted utility of a representative non-emigrant. Finally, we show that the government can choose to spend more on education in order to counter the detrimental impacts of brain drain on economic growth.

Comments on this home page are most welcome. Please click here.
Alternatively, please write to
karyiu@u.washington.edu.

This page was last revised on March 16, 2008.