Highly Skilled Returnees and Economic Spillovers Effect: The Case of Private Clinics in Jordan

Education, training and experiences are keys to investment in human capital formation, and migration of highly skilled is also an investment involving costs and rendering returns, in terms of improving the expected future real income. Migration of people endowed with a high level of human capital could be risky for the sending countries under the nomenclature of the brain drain phenomenon; rather there are conditions under which this drain can be converted into a gain. This paper is aimed to asses the effect of different foreign human capital attained by medical doctors on their clinics revenues. A survey among private medical clinics at three districts in the capital Amman was stratified by physicians' specialties. Poisson regression model and Ordinary Least Square were used to find the relationship between physicians' different sources of human capital variables and their clinics revenues. Preliminary results indicate that returnees with foreign medical certificates and professional experiences have ultimately attracted more patients than their counterparts of local medical certificates and experiences. That is, the investment in human capital through circular migration has spillover effect into gains to private clinics