Experts bat for conventional wisdom
by WILLIAM ALZONA

MANILA -- NUMBERS tell it all: 200 million migrants, $225 billion remittances.

But the concepts of “brain gain” and “brain drain” threw a monkey wrench in the attempt by experts to pinpoint the positive and negative effects of international migration in knowledge societies.

Generally, what the 288-paged World Bank study “International Migration, Remittances and the Brain Drain” can offer in the long run is conventional wisdom.

“The negative impact of the brain drain on the development of source countries has generally been accepted as received wisdom,” the recent study by the world’s largest multilateral institution can say after months of poring over past and current data on migration.

The Philippines, for example, will celebrate a century of migration. This is a hundred years of sending abroad the best and the brightest of the country’s workforce, now estimated at eight million in more than 190 countries.

Still, economists Frédéric Docquier and Abdeslam Marfouk who co-wrote chapters on the matter of brain drain in the study, said there is lack of data on migration.

“Many institutions consider the lack of harmonized international data on migration by country of origin and education level as the major problem for monitoring the scope and impact of brain drain in developing areas,” Docquier and Marfouk wrote.

While the whole WB study cites there is a “fair amount” of evidence suggesting that brain drain is now much more extensive than it was two or three decades ago, authors like Docquier and Marfouk could only provide tentative analyses.

The WB study, produced by its research department, includes a detailed analysis of household survey data in the Philippines, Mexico, and Guatemala.

The study pointed out that until today there is difficulty on how extensive brain drain is on the sending countries as “there has been no systematic empirical assessment of the brain-drain magnitude.”

Beyond money
FOR years, theories persist that migration of workers to wealthy nations could result to “brain drain,” that, in turn, harms developing economies like the Philippines. Such claims could neither be proven nor dismissed throughout.

Docquier and Marfouk said the difficulty here lies in the reality that migrant worker sending countries do not provide a clear picture of its emigration.

“When available, they are incomplete and imprecise,” the authors said adding: “Existing data do not allow us to systematically eliminate foreign-born individuals who arrived with completed schooling or after a given age threshold.”

Still, Filipino-American economist Dean Yang, who contributed extensively to the WB study, said the Philippines, a labor exporting country, was not mentioned as severely affected by brain drain.

“But that does not mean there is no brain drain problem in the Philippines,” Yang said in response to questions sent via electronic mail by the OFW Journalism Consortium.

Yang, a professor of Public Policy and Economics in Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy of the University of Michigan, explained that just like him, the bank invited people to write on their expertise but it turned out none of the authors chose to write about the Philippines.

The Philippines has the second-most number of skilled workers that went out for work either to the US or the Middle East, the WB study cited using year 2000 figures. Its data showed the country had 1.12 million skilled people that went out, next to the United Kingdom’s 1.44 million people.

In Asia, the Philippines sent the most number of people in the year 2000. India, the worlds second-most populous country, followed at 1.03 million, China at 816,000, South Korea at 652,894, and Vietnam at 506,471.

The study cited that brain drain is affecting most small countries in Central America and Africa such as Guyana, Grenada, and Jamaica. In Asia, the countries most affected by a similar phenomenon accompanying migration were Laos, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Cambodia.

“Our analysis shows only a small so-called ‘brain gain,’ or increase in the average level of education in the sending country, (is) due to anticipated migration,” Docquier and Marfouk said.

Experience empirical
THE difficulty in getting empirical assessment today with two decades of data boils down to the magnitude of what migrant workers represent that passes through national borders: remittances. It became easier to count the money than migration’s effects on workforce development.

Indeed, the growth of remittances being sent by migrant workers from Mexico, the Philippines, and China –especially those earned in the United States– is staggering. It has grown four times the amount of money sent by developed countries’ states for development projects of such countries.
The World Bank’s Global World Outlook even cites that total remittances for this year have hit US$225 billion. The bank’s Global Finance Report released April estimated only almost half of this amount, at US$126 billion.

Since 2001, the GFR added, remittances to developing countries have increased by $41 billion, or almost 50 percent.

Compare the expected total remittances for this year and the amount the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) expects developed countries to give to eradicate poverty, at $125 billion in official development aid (ODA) by 2015, and it will appear migrant workers are more generous.
What would take another decade for some 22 donor countries to allot for the world's poor was already remitted by migrant workers back to their home countries last year and doubled ten years earlier.

Still, National Economic Development Authority (Neda) Director-General Juan B. Santos downplayed the role of remittances on ODA.

“Remittances have no effect: There is no direct correlation between OFW remittances and ODA inflows,” Santos said.

The Philippines’s Chief Socioeconomic Planner explained that ODA inflows is related to project financing and the money here “is being used to pay for equipment or the services of the expatriate consultants”.

“The good thing about OFW remittances is that we have plenty of dollars in the system,” Santos said adding that ODA giving countries also earn back what they lend while remittances circulate only within the Philippine borders.

Indeed, more than the money and conventional wisdom, brain drain or brain gain from migration remains “complex challenges that need to be better understood in order to develop the right policies,” the WB study said. end