Capturing the positive effects of brain drain through return migration policies: An analysis of the 1980-2022 Moroccan experience

The emigration of highly educated and skilled individuals from low- and middle- to high-income countries has often been synonymous with human capital losses for the countries of origin, a phenomenon known as "brain drain" (Bhagwati and Hamada, 1974). However, under some conditions, these losses can be offset by human capital formation in the source countries precisely due to emigration. In this case, one talks about "beneficial brain drain" and this phenomenon has been coined "brain gain" (Stark et al., 1997, 1998). Using data on the Kingdom of Morocco covering the 1980-2022 period, we investigate the extent to which the government drew economic benefits from an important population of Moroccans living abroad by implementing return migration policies. More specifically, we explore the effects of measures targeting the Moroccan diasporas and their contributions to the Kingdom's economy on (i) the attractiveness of the Kingdom for foreign investors; (ii) the quality and capacity of the country's commercial air and maritime transport infrastructure; and (iii) the level of modernization of its public administration. The data analysis shows that these measures had a positive impact on each of these key dimensions of development, suggesting that this type of policies can be effective in capturing some of the "brain gain" effects that have been highlighted in the empirical literature on the relationship between emigration and development in developing countries (Beine et al., 2001, 2008; Batista et al., 2025).