People Aspects of Technological Change
Canada-U.S. Law Journal, Vol. 25, Pp. 53-65, 1999
Posted: 4 May 2000
Abstract
NAFTA as well as all other trade agreements create a debate over labor mobility provisions as a means of facilitating trade. In particular, temporary visa provisions in NAFTA increased the mobility of highly skilled Canadians to the United States. The resulting brain drain was unanticipated and complemented the rapid growth in bilateral trade and the net flow of financial capital from Canada to the United States in the 1990?s. This human capital outflow became a major policy issue by the mid-1990?s in Canada. Concerns over lost public finance and growth opportunities coupled with an inability to replace this lost manpower with traditional third world immigrants fuelled the debate in Canada. This paper suggests two policy tools to mitigate the impact of this NAFTA induced brain drain to the United States from Canada without reducing mobility provisions in the trade agreement. First a Canadian post-secondary contingent student loan scheme should be instituted to offset the value of the lost Canadian human capital and a private based immigrant recruiting mechanism in Canada is suggested to improve the quality of Canada?s replacement immigrants.
Note: This is a description of the paper and is not the actual abstract.
JEL Classification: K33
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation