Unemployment of the educated and emigration of post-secondary graduates from the LDCs

The author examines the emigration of educated individuals from developing countries and reviews selected approaches to the study of international human capital flows. Attention is then given to two policy issues: the financing of postsecondary education and an international brain drain tax. The following factors are identified as critical in their impact on educated worker migration: "(a) the rigidity or flexibility of the wage in the market for the services of educated labour; (b) the extent of government subsidy (explicit or implicit) of the cost of post-secondary education; (c) the extent of responsiveness of the investment in education to the private return on such investment or its being exogenously controlled by the government; and (d) the type of restrictions (if any) imposed by the receiving industrialized countries on the migration flows from the LDCs." Comments by M. Ali Khan on a previous article by Blomqvist on the subject are also included (pp. 655-6).