Abstract
International talent’s mobility has increased over the last decade, especially in the wake of globalization and knowledge economy. China no longer exclusively shows an asymmetrical flow to developed countries, but it often turns out to be the most desirable destination of brain circulation for some overseas high-level young returned talents. In this context, based on the data obtained from the “Thousand Youth Talents Plan” (2011–2016) publicized by the Central Millennium Plan Office, the methods of the Moran’s I index, the Getis-Ord Gi* index, and the Poisson regression model are adopted in this study to analyze the location choice of overseas high-level young returned talents in China and its driving factors. The spatial configuration shows up that the United States is the most important origin overseas and China’s municipalities or provincial capitals are the most remarkable destinations. Moreover, the analysis reveals the distribution by academic majors is uneven, which may be caused by knowledge priority and legacies of China’s Soviet-style innovation system. The main analysis is extended with the Poisson regression model to estimate the significance of the influence factors. The empirical results show that the factors in order of importance are academic opportunity, urban amenity, and place attachment. Concretely, the most important factors for location choice of overseas high-level young returned talents, namely research and development (R&D) investment, internal convenience and hierarchy level in science and technology (S&T) system, external accessibility, transportation accessibility, university endowment, and health care are the substantial secondary factors, while place-oriented talent agglomeration and prior alumni connection play a minor role.
Highlights
Human capital is one of the main driving forces of innovation as well as regional and national competitiveness
The influence coefficients of place attachment are close to zero. These concepts differ in their focus, they explicitly address the fact that Hypothesis 1 (H1), Hypothesis 2 (H2), and Hypothesis 3 (H3) are accepted to a varying degree, which the variables are significant factors that drive the overseas high-level young returned talent to fulfill the relocation processes
Examining returned talent data obtained from the “Thousand Youth Talents Plan” from 2011 to 2016, this study discusses the spatial pattern of overseas high-level young returned talent with a focus on city-level locations
Summary
Human capital is one of the main driving forces of innovation as well as regional and national competitiveness. China’s domestic innovation has been gradually improving [9]; some major Chinese cities gradually move up the hierarchical level within the global city network [10] In this context, there has been a burgeoning research on the dynamic and location choice over the recent decades. The analysis results of this study will contribute to a better understanding of the spatial structure of city hierarchy driven by high-skilled human capital in particular and emerging economies in general. For this purpose, this study uses the data on overseas high-level young returned talent obtained from the website http://www.1000plan.org, which is vital to China’s talent program. Sustainability 2020, 12, 9210 of a dynamic interface of professional and personal factors [6,10,23]—that is the result of rethinking about the social advantages versus academic benefits from living in China, which involves three main aspects: (1) quality of life named urban amenity, (2) academic development opportunities, and (3) place attachment
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