The Brain Drain: A Survey of the Literature

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Department of Statistics, Working Paper No. 2006-03-02

29 Pages Posted: 8 Apr 2009

Date Written: April 7, 2009

Abstract

This article reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the Brain Drain (BD hereafter). This literature starts in the 1950s and focuses on different economic and social topics. We survey about 400 articles which treat the BD's phenomenon. Through the complete list of articles would be endless, this review can be used as a systematic study to analyse the theoretical evolutions of the BD from the 1950s to the recent years. Actually there are not studies that help the researcher to understand better the BD's literature. In this work we try to propose a first analysis of this literature that can be a useful starting point for furthermore research. In particular, we explore the several BD's definitions (we show that there in not an unique definition of the BD and that the BD is a wide and complex phenomenon); we analyse the main literature of the BD and we propose an ideal path to interpret this literature; we investigated the historical roots of the BD by quoting the cases that studies "ante litteram" the BD; we identified the several researchers that during these years have studied the BD and the models that they have used; finally we recreated the geography of the BD to better understand the motivation behind these studies.

Keywords: Brain Drain, International Migration, Human Capital, Growth, Economic Methodology and History of Economic Thought

JEL Classification: B20, B41, F02, F22, H20, I20, I30

Suggested Citation

Giannoccolo, Pierpaolo, The Brain Drain: A Survey of the Literature (April 7, 2009). Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Department of Statistics, Working Paper No. 2006-03-02, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1374329 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1374329

Pierpaolo Giannoccolo (Contact Author)

University of Bologna ( email )

Department of Economics
Piazza Scaravilli, 2
40125 Bologna, 40125
Italy

HOME PAGE: http://www2.dse.unibo.it/giannoccolo