A Global Assessment of Human Capital Mobility: The Role of non-OECD Destinations

The discourse concerning the mobility of human capital internationally typically evokes migratory patterns from poorer to relatively more wealthy countries and this focus is strongly reflected in the (brain drain) literature. This emphasis omits an important and as yet understudied aspect of the phenomena however, namely skill transfer to non-OECD and in particular, emerging nations. This paper contributes to the literature by first developing a new dataset of international bilateral migration stocks by gender and education level, which includes both OECD and non-OECD countries as destinations in 1990 and 2000. We then use pseudo-gravity model regressions to impute missing values where data are not available, such that we are able to provide, for the first time, a global assessment of human capital mobility. The comprehensiveness of the resulting matrices facilitates a more nuanced definition of emigration rates based on the concept of the natural labour force, which additionally considers both entries and exits of workers.