Do Potential Skilled Emigrants Care About Political Stability at Home?

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the role of political stability in the source country as a potential reason for skilled emigration. We control for all prospective source country characteristics and yet skilled emigration is seen to be driven by a relatively better situation of political stability in the home country. Our research clearly shows that government stability, socioeconomic conditions, investment profiles, democratic accountability, 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. The results retain robustness even for a subset of only developing nations.

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

JEL Classification: F22, O15, O1