‘Brain drain’ or ‘talent mobility’, referred to as the exodus of highly skilled and (generally ) young workers from developing countries to developed countries (Golovics, 2019), is one of the thorny contemporary issues (Kapur, 2015). While developing countries complain for being ‘stolen away’ of their brightest and youngest human resources in whom lies the hope for future development, academic debates have been revolving around ‘push’ factors versus ‘pull’ factors that explain the phenomenon (Roudgar & Richards, 2015). This Debating Development series sets out to discuss the issue from a policy perspective. It intends to understand what can be done to transform the brain drain phenomenon into a win-win solution for both sending and receiving countries.
Frédéric Docquier has been acting as a Research Program Leader (on Crossing Borders) at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) since 2019. He is also Affiliate Professor at the University of Luxembourg where he is coordinating the ACROSS doctoral training unit. Previously, he was Professor of Economics at the Université catholique de Louvain and Research Associate of the FNRS (2005-19), Associate Professor at the University of Lille (1997-2005), and Invited Professor at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (2015-18), Université Clermont-Auvergne (2013-18) and Université de Nantes (2009-15), among others. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Université d'Aix-Marseille. His research interests are in economics of migration, quantitative development theory, economic growth. He acted as a ST Consultant for the World Bank, and as an external expert for the United Nations (UNESCO and High-Level Panel on the post-2015 Development Agenda) and Agence Française de Développement. He published articles in Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of the European Economic Association, Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Economic Geography, Journal of International Economics, Journal of Development Economics, and many other journals.
Dr. Gunjan Sondhi is a lecturer in Geography at The Open University, UK. Her work is embedded within feminist scholarship and critical intersectional approaches to migration and mobility. Her research is concerned with the relationship between gender, mobility, work and education. She employs comparative mixed method approaches to examine skilled and education international mobility. This work has stretched across the globe into and across countries of North America, Europe, South and Southeast Asia. Recently, she has contributed to an ILO report Indian Women’s Migration to the EU and to the annual publication Indian Migration Report. She has also published an edited textbook Researching Everyday Geographies that sets up doing geographical research differently by starting from feminist and Black geographies. Presently, she is collaborating with a network of African scholars through her British Academy funded project Writing International Student Migration in Africa. This is a joint project between African Network of International Education – ANIE – and The Open University.