The economics of the ?brain drain?: The Canadian case

Abstract

Thb term "brain drain" has, I believe, been invented in the United Kingdom, where it has been used to dramatise a particular situation in which the national government is financially responsible for a wide range of activities employing large numbers of professional people especially in the National Health Service and the universities and exercises a considerable influence over their salaries and work-related expenditures. The government has used its power to keep these salaries and expenditures from rising as rapidly as they would have done under the pressure of growing world demand for professional skills, with the result that many trained people, especially among the sciences, have been emigrating to North America in pursuit of higher salaries and more generous research support, at a time when national policy is calling for the employment of vastly increased numbers of trained people. In the United Kingdom, therefore, the " brain drain " is a real phenomenon and can be explained by government policy. From the United Kingdom, the term has been appropriated into Canadian usage. Whether it is a real phenomenon in Canada I shall discuss later in this paper. At this stage, I wish merely to point out that if it is, the explanation cannot lie in deliberate governmental under-pricing of educated talent and to note for future reference that Canada has been a major beneficiary of the British "brain drain".