Content area
Full Text
Even if the current economic slump has reduced global demand for IT and other specialty workers, foreign talent remains in demand.
In 2000 the British government and the Wolfson Foundation, a research charity, launched a five-year research award that raised little attention outside scientific circles. The L20 million scheme aims to attract the return of Britain's leading expatriate scientists and the migration of top young researchers to the United Kingdom. That same year under greater media coverage, the US Congress announced it was raising the annual cap on the number of temporary work visas granted to highly skilled professionals under its HIB visa programme, from 115 000 to 195 000 per year until 2003.
These are just two examples that illustrate the growing demand and competition for talent in OECD countries. And they show a policy problem: how to attract and hold on to skilled labour. The British initiative also dispels a myth: that the problem only affects developing and transition economies. In fact, the British Royal Society first coined the expression "brain drain to describe the outflow of scientists and technologists to the United States and Canada in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Global skilled workers
Internationally comparable data on the migration of the highly skilled is incomplete, but sources confirm an increase in migration flows during the 1990s, from Asia to the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. The increase comes from strong demand in OECD countries for IT and other skills in science and technology as well as the selective immigration policies that favour skilled workers. Not all skilled migrants are in search of educational, economic or intellectual opportunities. Sometimes, they are forced to leave their homes as a result of war, or political, ethnic and religious persecution. Skilled migration between OECD countries is also on the rise but appears dominated by temporary flows of advanced students, researchers, managers and IT specialists, suggesting more a pattern of brain circulation than a draining of skills from one place to another. The globalisation of firms has helped fuel temporary flows; in the mid-1990s intra-company transfers accounted for 5-10% of the total flows of skilled workers to the United States from Canada.
The United States is the main pole of attraction for...