Can Health Foreign Assistance Reduce the Medical Brain Drain?

In this article, we analyse the impact of foreign health aid on the emigration rates of physicians. The analysis is based on a dataset of physician emigration rates from 50 source countries between 1998 and 2004. First, we investigate the direct impact of health assistance using the generalised method of moments estimation, and we highlight the significant negative effect of foreign health assistance on the medical brain drain. Second, we show that this effect results more from technical assistance than from financial assistance. Finally, the robustness of our analysis is verified to confirm the validity of the results