Anxieties are often expressed in Europe about the risk of a “brain drain” to foreign countries, in particular to the United States. If we look at the American censuses from 1980 to 2006, we can observe the phenomenon, by distinguishing the successive cohorts of migrants originating from different European countries. Overall, the number of European expatriates increases, but remains small. However, the emigration is selective. The expatriate population is particularly well educated and this selectivity is higher for the most recent cohorts of emigrants. Furthermore, these cohorts include a larger proportion of engineers, researchers and academics than the previous ones, the very people whose qualifications correspond to the innovation activities targeted by the Lisbon Strategy. It is this increasing quality of the expatriates that should alarm us.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Article provided by CEPII research center in its journal La Lettre du CEPII.