Aid for Health, Economic Growth, and the Emigration of Medical Workers

Mauro Lanati,Rainer Thiele

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3763947

Abstract

Debates on the extent to which developing countries suffer from a brain drain often focus on the emigration of locally scarce health personnel. In this paper, we empirically examine how two potential determinants - aid for health and local income levels - affect the emigration rates of doctors and nurses from developing countries. Employing a standard gravity model of international migration, we show that aid for health has a negative effect on the emigration of both nurses and doctors. The quantitative impact is moderate but non-negligible: doubling the amount of foreign assistance received by developing countries in the health sector lowers the emigration rates of health personnel by around 10%. Our findings suggest that donors influence the emigration decisions of doctors and nurses through improvements in health infrastructure and health care services. Higher income per capita is also associated with lower emigration from developing countries for doctors and nurses alike. Given that nurses typically belong to the poorer segments of populations in the countries of origin, we can conclude that even at low initial income levels, on balance, economic growth provides an incentive to stay rather than enabling would-be migrants to finance migration costs and encouraging them to leave.

Highlights

South–north migration of skilled people has become an increasingly important phenomenon over the past few decades, with the number of high-skilled migrants residing in member countries of the OECD growing at a much faster rate than the respective number of low-skilled migrants (Botezat & Ramos, 2020)
The results suggest that the time variation of both per capita income and health aid is negatively associated with bilateral emigration of the healthcare workforce
Our empirical results show that additional health aid and higher GDP per capita are both associated with lower emigration for both groups of medical workers

Summary

Introduction

South–north migration of skilled people has become an increasingly important phenomenon over the past few decades, with the number of high-skilled migrants residing in member countries of the OECD growing at a much faster rate than the respective number of low-skilled migrants (Botezat & Ramos, 2020). The present paper investigates how two potential determinants, aid for health and local income levels, affect emigration rates of doctors and nurses from developing countries.

Results

Conclusion