Spatial mobility in elite academic institutions in economics: the case of Spain

Abstract

Using a dataset of 3540 economists working in 2007 in 125 of the best academic centers in 22 countries, this paper presents some evidence on spatial mobility patterns in Spain and other countries conditional on some personal, department, and country characteristics. There are productivity and other reasons for designing a scientific policy with the aims of attracting foreign talent (brain gain), minimizing the elite brain drain, and recovering nationals who have earned a Ph.D. or have spent some time abroad (brain circulation). Our main result is that Spain has more brain gain, more brain circulation and less brain drain than comparable large, continental European countries, i.e., Germany, France, and Italy, where economists have similar opportunities for publishing their research in English or in their own languages. We suggest that these results can be mostly explained by the governance changes introduced in a number of Spanish institutions in 1975-1990 by a sizable contingent of Spanish economists coming back home after attending graduate school abroad. These initiatives were also favored by the availability of resources to finance certain research-related activities, including international Ph.D. programs.

Recognizing New Trends in Brain Drain Studies in the Framework of Global Sustainability

“…Finally, this study contributes to providing temporary coverage of 55 years (1965-2020). The various international scientific collaborations, resulting from the intellectual human capital mobility [12,[131][132][133], constitutes a partnership that allows progress in global sustainability (17th SDG) [134][135][136][137][138].…”

“…Results show that a set of studies focused on destination countries [143][144][145] raises the necessity of a change of approach since these types of studies were initially raised based on the loss of advanced intellectual capital in the countries of origin. However, studies are currently rethinking their orientation to brain gain [12,[145][146][147][148][149], and to ideas of migratory dynamics presented in the brain circulation [12,47,146,147,[150][151][152][153][154]. Results emphasize that policies and efforts need to change if policymakers look at researchers' brain drain concept use.…”

“…For example, scholars must focus their analysis beyond countries with a high level of development, which constitutes a new challenge in this line of research toward the study of the effects of the brain drain in the peripheral areas of knowledge production, contributing to a better understanding of the phenomenon in those geographic areas and design new public policies, in the economic dimension of sustainability [17], to strengthen innovation and local industry [32,47,140,[155][156][157]. Likewise, public policies should be approached from a logic of adaptation to the global mobility of advanced intellectual human capital (brain circulation) and not only from a drain perspective [12,158] and with a greater emphasis on the intellectual human capital attraction policies and not principally focused on brains retention or forced return [45], avoiding the research groups break [159] and promoting geographically distributed research [160][161][162][163].…”

“…In any case, the article that elicits the most significant connotation in the first three decades of brain drain studies to date is the proposed economic model of Kwok and Leland [11]. Kwok and Leland's work mentioned above is still used today as part of some countries' public policies [12]. Among the policy implications, the authors mention: (1) A government information policy on foreign educational programs, which helps employers in the "qualification" of each graduate abroad's records.…”

Outlining inbreeding in the Brazilian higher education system

“…This situation limits internationalization, as most of the papers published by Brazilian scholars are in Portuguese and in non-indexed journals (Finardi & Guimarães, 2017). Carrasco and Ruiz-Castillo (2019) favour, in this case, a comparison among countries with similar opportunities for publishing in the local language and in English.…”