Estimation Of The Economic Impact Of Brain Drain On The Labor Expelling Country

Abstract

The emigration of human resources leads to many losses for the labor expelling country. Such losses would, without doubt, adversely affect the economic and social development programs in multiple aspects including state loss of migrants efforts in producing the desired growth whether in the planning and preparation stages or in the implementation stage and the cost opportunity represented in the financial resources spent on the migrants prior to their emigration which could have been utilized in other areas taking into account, the limited financial resources in the underdeveloped countries which are mainly labor expelling countries. Hence, the loss of such countries is doubled. They neither benefited from their labor after years of spending in education and health, nor they saved their funds and exploited in other alternatives like improving education and health services, providing job opportunities for residents, improving the innovation climate or even increasing civil production to improve the living standards of individuals. The study is devoted to analyze and measure of economic effects of labor emigration in the labor expelling economy, through taking Egypt – the largest Arab country suffering from this phenomenon- as an example and using data derived from Egyptian sources. Estimates have emphasized growing losses generated by the Egyptian labor emigration, especially by brain drain. The paper concludes that measures and policies must be adopted to stop this drain by addressing the causes of labor emigration or rather, the existing properties of the labor expelling country. Also, efforts must be made to ensure that data related to immigration is always available, updated and estimated by official bodies having human, financial and technical capabilities for this task.