Determinants of health professionals’ migration in Africa: a WHO based assessment

Abstract

Purpose -How do economic prosperity, health expenditure, savings, price-stability, demographic change, democracy, corruption-control, press-freedom, government effectiveness, human development, foreign-aid, physical security, trade openness and financial liberalization play-out in the fight against health-worker crisis when existing emigration levels matter? Despite the acute concern of health-worker crisis in Africa owing to emigration, lack of relevant data has made the subject matter empirically void over the last decades.Design/methodology/approach -A quantile regression approach is used to assess the determinants of health-worker emigration throughout the conditional distributions of healthworker emigration. This provides an assessment of the determinants when existing emigrations levels matter.Findings -Findings provide a broad range of tools for the fight against health-worker braindrain. As a policy implication, blanket emigration-control policies are unlikely to succeed equally across countries with different levels of emigration. Thus to be effective, immigration policies should be contingent on the prevailing levels of the crisis and tailored differently across countries with the best and worst records on fighting health worker emigration.Originality/value -This paper has examined the theoretical postulations of a WHO report on determinants of health-worker migration.

High‐skilled emigration and child health in Africa

“…The implications are that, high-skilled emigration may have positive and negative effects on economic growth as well as other development indicators such as health outcomes. However, while the determinants of high-skilled emigration (see e.g., Adetayo, 2010;Beine et al, 2008;Docquier et al, 2007;Ienciu & Ienciu, 2014;Kattel & Sapkota, 2018;Marfouk, 2008;Meango, 2016;Ngoma & Ismail, 2013;Shafique, 2017;Simplice, 2015) as well as its effects on remittances or economic growth and investment (see for instance, Mountford, 1997;Beine et al, 2001;Kirigia et al, 2006;Ha et al, 2009;Gibson & McKenzie, 2010;Akanbi, 2017;Bove & Elia, 2017;Adeyemi et al, 2018;Bredtmann et al, 2019) have been widely researched, very little is known regarding the effect of highskilled emigration on health outcomes, especially in Africa (see Chikanda, 2006;Clemens, 2007;Chauvet et al, 2013;Uprety, 2019a).…”

The Impact of Institutional Factors on Bilateral Migration: the Gravity Approach

“…International migration and its determinants are widely studied in the academic literature. Numerous studies address the role of macroeconomic determinants in explaining migration flows (Ackah-Medvedev 2012;Ortega-Peri 2013;Simplice 2015;Walmsley et al 2011). Ramos and Suriñach (2017) confirm the main assumptions of the gravity approach.…”