Education, economic growth, and brain drain

This paper constructs a two-sector overlapping-generations model of endogenous growth to study the effects of brain drain on growth, education and income distribution. It is shown that brain drain reduces the economic growth rate and generally hurts the non-emigrants through the static income-distributional effects and the dynamic damage on economic growth and human capital accumulation. If the initial rate of human capital accumulation is relatively low, brain drain could deteriorate both the sum of discounted income and lifetime discounted utility of a representative non-emigrant. The government can choose to spend more on education to lessen the detrimental growth effects of brain drain.