46th BCS Written

Read the text below and answer the questions that follow:

When scientists, health care providers, entrepreneurs, and other business and management talent consistently leave the country of birth for opportunities abroad, it creates persistent drag on the home country’s economy and blights its growth. This phenomenon is popularly known as brain drain, a coinage of the British Royal Society in response to the emigration of scientists from the United Kingdom to the United States and Canada in the 1950s and 60s.

Brain drain affects the home country and the companies within it in numerous and interconnected ways, making cause and effect difficult to disentangle. With a depleted entrepreneurial class, who is there to develop goods and services, create jobs, and drive economic growth? The departure of physicians and nurses stresses the health care system and compromises public health. Scientists and technologists leave, taking with them not only the knowledge and skills they may have obtained at the state’s expense but also their capacity to drive the innovation that fuels economic development and international prestige.

Companies in places with high emigration rates also face significant challenges that stifle innovation and hinder execution on strategy. Among them, there are a more limited talent pool from which to hire and promote, and higher turnover among the ranks as employees seek opportunities outside the home country—employees that the business has spent time and money developing. An exodus of business and management talent deprives the home country’s companies and especially start-ups of the skills and savvy needed to grow and flourish.

One of the challenges in emerging economies—countries often spend scarce resources educating doctors, engineers, and scientists in the hope that they will build growth at home, only to watch in dismay as they migrate to the West.

This in turn becomes a vicious circle: home countries need talent to create opportunity, but without opportunity, talent gravitates to the bigger cities and better jobs elsewhere in the world.

Brain drain has long vexed the policymakers. Investments in education are seemingly squandered when the educated depart for greener pastures. But dialing down investment in education will not help grow the opportunity at home that would lure the best and brightest to remain.

Of course, remittances from emigrees mitigate some of the economic toll. For instance, a study cited in ‘The Economist’ found that Ghanaian emigrants sent home enough money over their working lives abroad to cover the cost of their education several times over.

And there are softer benefits of emigration. For example, they help build a country’s prestige. Some 40 percent of graduates of India’s elite engineering schools migrate to Silicon Valley. There they have furnished the country’s image and fueled investments in it.

Still, brain drain is an issue countries and companies need to tackle, to turn a vicious circle into a virtuous one. Even though brain drain affects developed countries such as New Zealand, where nearly a quarter of college graduates emigrate, brain drain has a greater impact on developing countries. Hence, the need to reverse it is stronger and more urgent.

So what can countries and companies that see their best and brightest leave do in response, what can they do to reverse the brain drain?

The first imperative for policymakers is to create opportunity and a critical mass of the educated and entrepreneurial. Taiwan’s example is particularly instructive. Aided by a growing economy, Taiwan has been able to stem the flight of its top talent. The country forged business-friendly policies that encouraged entrepreneurs to stay and emigrants to return. It founded the Hsinchu science-based Industrial Park in 1980, with the goal of replicating the density of talent found in Silicon Valley and other hotbeds of technological innovation.