ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the consequences for developing countries of skilled migration. Migration is driven primarily by differences between countries and the desire of people to take advantage of these differences to improve their lives. The most important of these are differences in income, technology, and age structure. The traditional theory of economic growth predicted convergence, that poor countries will tend to grow faster than rich countries and catch up with them. This would reduce the wage and income gaps and therefore migration pressures. The term 'brain drain' is used to represent the collection of these negative consequences. In general, fear of brain drain comes from the reasonable worry that the development process is already quite fragile, and that the loss of human capital can jeopardize this process even further. The brain drain is a threat to economic development presumes the existence of an externality, a gap between the value of a person's contribution to society and that person's wage.
