Brain drain, or human capital flight, is a buzzword that describes the departure of highly-skilled, well-educated individuals from developing nations to developed nations. The issue of brain drain has come to a head in many developing nations.
Recently, EU nations, such as Germany and France, have been facing a brain drain as well as their well-skilled individuals left their nations in search of better lives in North America. As a result, the EU has proposed the introduction of the Blue Card, EU’s equivalent of the US’s Greed Card. Once the Blue Card system is implemented across the EU, doctors, engineers, IT experts, etc. from non-EU nations can legally stay for 30-90 days and bring their family members within the 90 days. In the end, the EU’s Blue Card and the US’s Green Card would serve as a double whammy for third world countries.
South Korea is another nation suffering from a brain drain to a great degree. According to the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), S. Korea scored 4.63 on the Brain Drain Index (BDI) last year, finishing 37th out of 60 countries. The index, on a scale of 0 to 10, shows the intensity of the “brain drain” from each country. The lower the reading the severer the brain drain is.
Therefore, judging from S. Korea’s index score of 4.63, the nation belongs to the group of countries suffering from a brain drain. The IMD index for S. Korea held at 3.68 in 2011 and 3.40 in 2012, ranking 44thand 49thout of 59 countries respectively. Compared to these previous index scores, last year’s score is a big improvement. Yet, the gulp between South Korea and other developed nations is huge. By comparison, Norway came out on top with the highest index of 8.04, followed by Switzerland with 7.6, Sweden with 7.51, Finland with 7.28 and the U.S. with 7.11. Their high index scores indicate how far S. Korea lags behind in retaining talent.
Another survey showed similar results. According to a survey conducted by the US-based National Science Foundation, as much as 73.9 % of Koreans who obtained US doctorates in science or technology (e.g. engineering, natural sciences, biotechnology, etc.) said they did not want to return to their home country.As a matter of fact, about 54% of the Korean doctoral degree holders in science and engineering continued to stay in the US and 44% returned home. Nonetheless, the fact that more than a half of the Korean US PhD holders hoped to stay in the US is very worrying.
In this small, resource-poor nation, its vast pool of highly educated people, nurtured by the world’s hottest “education fever,” is all we can count on. Thus, the outflow of human capital to developed nations poses a greater threat to this small, resource-scarce nation than to other resource-rich nations with large land area.
Then, why is S. Korea incapable of either retaining or attracting talent US neoliberal economist Milton Friedman cited brains drain as one of the reasons for his argument against government regulations and intervention. Since young and capable people move to countries with lower tax rates in droves, government regulations and intervention, he argued, should be eliminated. He also pointed out that the research environments were not attractive enough to lure in well-educated people.
According to a recent survey by the Korea Institute of S&T Evaluation and Planning, 37.2 % of the surveyed 1,478 doctoral degree holders in science and engineering wanted to work overseas. 52.3% mentioned “poor research environment” as the main reason, 14.0% “education for children,” 7.8% “overseas settlement” and 6.4% “better wages.”
Indeed, brain drain is a loss of cutting-edge knowledge and technology. Thus, nations around the world are vying fiercely to attract talent. Some countries go to extremes: they commit technology theft by buying off engineers privy to key technologies. A police investigation found out that the key technology inside a robotic vacuum cleaner developed by some Korean company was leaked to a Chinese company by the Korean company’s former researchers.
Talk of the need for putting in place anti-brain drain policies is nothing new. The S. Korean government last year announced its “strategy for industrial sophistication through talent reinforcement.” The strategy was about the government pooling R&D (research and development) resources to annually produce, on average, 1,500 highly-skilled workers in high value-added sectors like engineering, offshore plants, SoCs, etc.
Now is the time for the S. Korean government to examine whether preexisting anti-brain drain policies have been properly implemented and urgently hammer out measures for improvement if necessary. The nation’s R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP is the second highest in the world. If South Korea is found to have poured the tremendous amounts of money down the drain, it is nothing but the current government’s gross dereliction of duty and a total waste of tax money. There is no doubt that stopping the brain drain will resuscitate the Korean economy.
