Aid-financed scholarships for African students to study in the US or Europe would be worth a lot more than a million “capacity-building” projects. The usual argument against such scholarships is fear of brain drain — that the African students would not return home.
So why is nobody worried about brain drain of the gigantic numbers of Asian students studying in the US?
The Aid Watch blog is a project of New York University's Development Research Institute (DRI). This blog is principally written by William Easterly, author of "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics" and "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good," and Professor of Economics at NYU. It is co-written by Laura Freschi and by occasional guest bloggers. Our work is based on the idea that more aid will reach the poor the more people are watching aid.
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11 Comments
The more important statistic is the number of foreign students in the United States that return to their countries of origin after their studies. I bet that the percentage of students returning home to East Asia after their studies are significantly higher than the percentage returning home to Africa.
An interesting side note to the discussion would be the relatively high percentage of Ethiopian students studying in the US and Europe that have returned home over the past couple of years. Anecdotally, I would guess that the percentage would compare favourably to rates in Asia, which surely is a good sign for the country’s prospects over the next 10-20 years.
Clinton era legislation instituted anti-brain drain laws, limiting the number of former Eastern bloc students trained particularly in the sciences staying in the States. Of course, that just provided a fresh crop of doctors, et al, for Canada.
Lucien has asked the right question: do you have the percentage of Asian students who go back home after completing their studies, versus the percentage of African students who go home?
On the other hand, it bothers me to think that radically different perceptions of Asians and Africans might influence creation of programs for aid-financed scholarships. Living a short drive from Silicon Valley as I do, maybe I hear more often than people in most of the United States do about how Asian “culture” equips Indians, Chinese, Koreans, etc., with the discipline and ambition needed for academic and professional success. But surely one hears this all over the country. Is it possible that not hearing anything like this about Africans discourages creation of programs of aid-financed scholarships for African students?
So why is nobody worried about brain drain of the gigantic numbers of Asian students studying in the US?
Because of the even more gigantic number of Asian students remaining in their home countries and attending university there?
I would imagine the reason is that most people don’t perceive Asia as a place of economic trouble. Stories about India and China are stories about growth, even if parts of those countries and Africa are in comparable states of development.
What makes you think nobody is worried? Recently, every time Japanese scientist working in the US wins Nobel prize, Japanese media fusses about brain drain.
At least in the public sector, I’m skeptical that overseas scholarships are put to good use. At the ministry where I workedi, everyone was constantly trying to snag a funded trip to the US or the UK, where they would go get a master in development economics at universities that usually flourished off of large international intakes and low academic standards.
They’d then come back, half-full of theory and econometrics, to return to being basically accountants. Everyone I knew was an economist by training, but very few of them every needed to use it. I saw little difference in capability between those that had gone and come back.
Furthermore, these scholarships inevitably ended up being part of the incentive structure (in an environment were per diems rule the day, what could be more coveted than a paid year in a foreign country?). Wonderful if was actually used to incentivize better work, but more often it just depended on whether or not it was “your turn” to go abroad.
Sure, it’s just one anecdotal data point, but it made a pretty strong impression on me. Instead of using scholarships, how about we just fund internships, where civil servants can go and see how things are done in other governments?
“They’d then come back, half-full of theory and econometrics, to return to being basically accountants. Everyone I knew was an economist by training, but very few of them every needed to use it.”
Maybe that is a good thing for the country. In Japan, we’ve got a bunch of economists who were trained as economists in the US and then served as economists in academia, the central bank, and the government. When we slid into a lost decade (or two decades), they collectively ignored the advices from notable economists abroad, because those advices were not what were written in the textbook they learned in the US.
I am happy to believe the claim that scholarships would be worth a lot more than capacity development projects, but could we be pointed to some empirical work that backs it up.
I don’t know about the Africans, but it seems like the French have a big brain drain problem!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/22/world/europe/22iht-educSide22.html?_r=1
This is good for Asian countries and Asians in the long term. People who studied and worked abroad came back to their own countries later and made remarkable difference. Ma Ying-jeou, the President of ROC(Taiwan), is a NYU Alumni.
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