Brain Drains Are Not So Bad After All

Societies that take in "brain drained" scientists and others benefit enormously. Innovative and entrepreneurial French Huguenots contributed mightily to the launch of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. American universities benefited mightily from refugee German Jews fleeing Adolf Hitler. Today's Silicon Valley would not be what it is without its brilliant Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs.

The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH) has the highest number of Nobel Prize winners of any institution in the world, no doubt partly due to the fact that 35 per cent of its faculty is foreign. From Cordoba 1,000 years ago to California today, the most intellectually stimulating places are crossroads for bright people from different cultures.

Societies that fail to attract foreign brains stagnate. Take Japan. Japan's homogeneity helped create the economic nationalism that drove the country for several decades, but today most of Japan's universities, research institutes and laboratories, think-tanks and elite publications, suffer from sclerotic inbreeding. Japan's current lethargy is due, in part, to the in-bred languor of Japanese intellectual life.

But aren't countries that export their "brains" impoverished by the process? It depends. Spain, for example, saw its best minds drained away for five centuries, notably following Fascism's victory in the Spanish Civil War. When Franco died in 1975, Spain's future path was not obvious, as evidenced by the attempted coup of February 1981.

Poor, dictatorial, marginalised from Europe, Spain's experience during the last quarter- century is one of history's most successful transition stories, as it became a prosperous, thriving democracy and ceased being a major exporter of brains. Indeed, many of Spain's best minds have returned home. More importantly, foreign brains now drain to Spain!

Historically, a big exporter of people, per inhabitant, has been Ireland. Poverty and the rigid social control of a reactionary Roman Catholic Church made the country inhospitable to intellectual life - to Britain's and America's great advantage, because both received many bright Irish fleeing the stultifying intellectual life of their homeland. As generally happens, the less intellectually endowed remained behind.

Yet, from developing world poverty levels two decades ago, Ireland has surpassed its former colonial master in GDP per capita. Becoming a committed European player, fostering foreign direct investment, including venture businesses, promoting financial services and IT resulted in a formidable brain drain reversal for Ireland.

After Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan in 1949 to form the Republic of China in opposition to Mao's People's Republic, he sought to maintain his dictatorial regime but was made to recognise the importance of building Taiwan's economy so as to strengthen the island. Thanks to generous US aid - Taiwan was for several decades second only to Israel in the amount of American aid received - Taiwan could send its best university students, especially engineers, to study abroad.

Now Taiwan has the highest proportion of engineers to total population in the world. Many Taiwanese engineers studied in prestigious American universities, with the result that in Boston people sometimes refer to MIT as "Made in Taiwan" rather than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As late as the 1980s, only two out of 10 Taiwanese who studied in the US returned home, due to its bleak social, intellectual and political environment.

Then Taiwan did several things: by establishing science parks, it provided a good environment for R&D; by deregulating, it provided opportunities for entrepreneurs; last, but emphatically not least, by ending the dictatorship and ushering in democracy, it provided the basis for that universal desire of people to pursue their individual freedom and happiness. In the 1990s, thanks to its returning brains, Taiwan became a high-tech powerhouse.

South Korea's story over the last 50 years parallels Taiwan's story. The military dictatorship established by Park Chung-hee in 1962 adopted an aggressive economic development policy, partly to contain North Korea. The Park government recognised the importance of investing in education, including primary, secondary and tertiary.

The problem for a dictator in building universities is that students are needed, and students often protest. Once Korean students overthrew the dictatorship of Park's successor, Chung Doo-hwan, Korean scientists, engineers, economists and others, returned home en masse, bringing knowledge acquired in the US with them.

So a brain drain can be a good thing for recipient countries and also for brain exporting countries. Good, that is, if the drain is reversed one day. Most people everywhere prefer to stay home, or return home, rather than live in permanent exile. Kimchi is simply not as good in Los Angeles as in Pusan, nor is chapathi as good in Manchester as in Hyderabad.

Brain drains put enormous pressure on brain exporting countries to improve their governance, their institutions and their economic and social freedoms. Such improvements are the ultimate test of a successful society. For this reason especially, but also for many others, the more brains that are drained, the better!

Jean-Pierra Lehmann is professor of International Political Economy at the International Institute for Management Development, Paris, and a director of the Evian Group - a coalition for global liberal government.