A gap in brain gain for emerging countries: Evidence of international immigration on non-resident patents

Immigration is a controversial topic that draws much debate. From a human sustainability perspective, immigration is disadvantageous for home countries causing brain drains. Ample evidence suggests the developed host countries benefit from immigration in terms of diversification, culture, learning, and brain gains, yet less is understood for emerging countries. The purpose of this paper is to examine the presence of brain gains due to immigration for emerging countries, and explore any gaps as compared to developed countries. Using global data from 88 host and 109 home countries over the period from 1995 to 2015, we find significant brain gains due to immigration for emerging countries. However, our results show that there is still a significant brain gain gap between emerging and developed countries. A brain gain to the developed host countries is about 5.5 times greater than that of the emerging countries. The results hold after addressing endogeneity, self-selection, and large sample biases. Furthermore, brain gain is heterogenous by immigrant types. Skilled or creative immigrants tend to benefit the host countries about three times greater than the other immigrants. In addition, the Top 10 destination countries seem to attract the most creative people, thus harvest the most out of the talented immigrants. In contrast, we find countries of origin other than the Top 10 seem to send these creative people to the rest of the world.