Do Potential Skilled Immigrants Care About Political Stability at Home?

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the role of political stability in the source country as a potential push/pull factor for emigrants. We control for all possible potential source country characteristics and yet find political stability to have a strong influence on the skilled emigration rate. While some proxies of political risks have a positive linear impact on skilled emigration, some others depict non-linear relations. Our research clearly shows that government stability, socioeconomic conditions, investment profiles, internal conflict and ethnic tensions in source nations have significant impacts on the rate of skilled emigration for a sample of developed and developing countries. For a sub-sample of developing countries, other indicators of political risks have their roles to play as well.

Keywords: Skilled Emigration, Political Risk, Developed and Developing Countries