ABSTRACT
Education adds to the value of the human resource base by raising the skill levels of those who have attended schools or have been involved in some specific formal or informal training. The enhanced population resource is not of great economic value in itself, and it needs to be linked to other productive resources to take advantage of the newly acquired potential, and therefore to allow its new value to be realized. The bringing together of different resources is an essential feature of any production process, and requires that at least some of these resources are mobile. People are the most mobile of productive resources, and it is this mobility that gives enormous importance to the human resource base in the development process. There is a strong and positive link between education and mobility: other things being equal, the educated in any population are more likely than the less educated to become migrants. This is borne out in a mass of empirical evidence in developed countries, e.g. in the United States (Shryock and Nam 1965) as in the Third World (Connell et al. 1976; Simmons et al. 1977). It is to this strong link that this chapter now turns, to examine how this relationship operates in the Third World and with what effects on development at the national and international scales.
