Skilled migration and health outcomes in developing countries
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Skilled migration and health outcomes in developing countries Dambar Uprety1
Received: 13 May 2017 / Accepted: 24 April 2018 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018
Abstract Many studies have found that health outcomes decline when health professionals leave the country, but do such results remain consistent in gender- and income-disaggregated skilled migration? To help uncover explanations for such a pro-migration nature of health outcomes, the present study revisits this topic but allows for associations of skilled migration with mortality and life expectancy to differ between male and female, and between lowand high-income countries. Using a panel of 133 developing countries as source and 20 OECD countries as destination from 1980 to 2010 allowing the coefficient on emigration across different education levels to differ, the study finds the negative effect of high-skilled emigration on health outcomes. Such effect is more pronounced for high-skilled female migration than those for male and for low-income countries than for middle-and high-income countries. Results also show that such adverse effect is larger for African countries than nonAfrican ones. However, the low-skilled migration appears to be insignificant to affect health outcomes in developing countries. Thus, skilled migration is detrimental to longevity in developing countries but unskilled migration is not. Keywords Skilled migration · Mortality · Life expectancy · Health outcomes JEL Classification F22 · I15
Introduction International migration has been taking an accelerated pace across the world in the recent years. During the 1990s, the number of migrants increased on an average by two million whereas this annual flow more than doubled to 4.6 million between 2000 and 2010. Emigration rates from low income to OECD countries are even higher for those individuals
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Dambar Uprety [email protected] Cameron School of Business, University of North Carolina, 601 S College Rd, Wilmington, NC 28403, USA
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with a tertiary education. In fact, for African countries like Kenya, Ethiopia and Trinidad and Tobago, more highly educated individuals are living outside these countries than within them. The migration of skilled individuals has attracted the attention of policy makers and economists. The exodus of skilled professionals is believed to impact several sectors such as education, income, poverty, politics and economic development of both sending and receiving countries. The current study investigates the effect of such flights on health outcomes in sending countries. Previous empirical studies have mainly concentrated on the effects of migration of health professionals such as nurses and doctors on health outcomes of the source country. 1 However, no research has examined on how aggregate and gender-disaggregated skilled migration affect health outcomes of the migrant sending countries. Emigration of skilled individuals may have positive or negative effects on health outcomes. The negative effects arise main
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