International students are seen as prospective skilled workers in the globalising competition for talent. However, little is known about the connections between international students' decisions to study abroad and their perspectives on continuing their career in the host country after graduation or subsequently settling there for a longer term. This paper addresses this research gap by examining international students' and graduates' perspectives on the study‐to‐work transition in Denmark. The analysis is based on interviews with international students enrolled in postgraduate science and technology programmes at universities in the Copenhagen metropolitan region and with recent international graduates who stayed on in Denmark as foreign workers after their studies. The paper considers how variegated combinations of personal factors and contextual circumstances have an impact on the ways in which individuals from diverse national backgrounds navigate through the study‐to‐work transition process. Denmark is a relatively new entrant into the global competition for talent. This makes it an interesting case of an evolving host‐country context where international students' status transition represents a challenging process, both for policy‐making and from the perspective of the individuals concerned. The results draw attention to the diversity of constraints and opportunities that shape individual student migrants' perspectives and trajectories. In conclusion, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the link between talent and student mobility by interweaving insights from compartmentalised bodies of literature, and by enriching empirical knowledge on the connection between factors that attract and retain international students in the host country. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
The current European policy agenda strongly accentuates the importance of research and development (R&D) as a driver of economic growth. The basic assumption is that high European wage levels make it unlikely that less research-intensive parts of the economy can withstand competition from low-wage countries with increasingly skilled labour forces. Thus, the inferior growth of the European Union (EU) in the 1990s compared with the USA has been explained by the latter’s higher rate of R&D investments. The paper challenges this rather simplistic view of innovation and examines the regional consequences of such policies. EU growth has caught up with that of the USA during recent years and low-tech industries continue to have considerable economic importance in Europe in terms of jobs and value added, especially outside the main growth regions, but also in the major urban regions. Empirical evidence from Denmark and the UK provided in the paper suggests that low- and high-tech industries are closely interconnected because low-tech firms play important roles both as partners in the innovation processes of high-tech firms and as buyers of high-tech products. Therefore, EU industrial policy is not appropriate because it overlooks the continuing significance of low-tech industries. Furthermore, the rather uniform focus on R&D is associated with a strong emphasis on large city-regions where research-intensive industries are concentrated and, thus, increasing regional inequality in Europe is being produced.
The paper focuses on the location dynamics and spatial distribution of talent by workplace to provide evidence of the multiplicity of economic geographies of city regions. City regions are not just homogenous growth machines but complex urban landscapes. The economic growth and revitalisation of the city region and the rise of the knowledge economy, including the growth of advanced business services, have produced new location dynamics that have changed the spatial division of labour. The rise of the knowledge economy has lead to an increasing focus on labour and labour qualification as an important location factor, including the recent focus on the creative class and human capital. Based on an analysis of Copenhagen, we examine the spatial division of talent within industries to provide evidence that new uneven economic geographies of city regions are currently being produced as a result of the new location dynamics of the knowledge economy. Further, it is argued that the intraregional division of talent differs considerably even within knowledge intensive industries. Copyright (c) 2009 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.
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