Is there a medical brain drain?

Abstract

This paper offers initial insights on the general circumstances under which a beneficial or a detrimental brain drain is obtained in the medical sector. For that purpose, we use an original dataset so as to analyze determinants of the evolution in the relative number of medical doctors in the world since the beginning of the 1990s. More precisely, we ask whether countries are converging or diverging in terms of the number of medical doctors and whether migration perspective gives an incentive to undergo medical studies. Our econometrics results show that (i) countries experience a (conditional) convergence process in their long-run equilibrium in terms of medical doctors per capita; (ii) the emigration rate of medical doctors has a positive and significant impact on education decision in the poorest countries. Some counterfactual experiments reveal that some African countries can benefit from the departure of their medical workers if emigration rates but under very restrictive conditions on medical doctors' emigration rates.