Civil War, Ethnicity, and the Migration of Skilled Labor

Abstract

We investigate the impact of civil war on high skilled emigration rates to the OECD over the period 1985-2000. Controlling for economic and institutional characteristics of source countries, we find that civil war increases high skilled emigration by about 5 percent on the average. However, the nature of conflict matters: While brain drain from countries with ethnic conflict is about 6-8 percent greater on average than it is from countries without conflict, brain drain from countries with nonethnic conflict is less, and statistically insignificant. Duration also matters: Each additional year of ethnic conflict worsens the brain drain by between 0.4 and 1 percent, whereas the effect of an additional year of nonethnic conflict is small and insignificant.

Impact of Ethnic Civil Conflict on Migration of Skilled Labor

“…It has been suggested that ethnic civil wars should lead to greater high-skilled emigration in both theory and empirics (Bang and Mitra, 2013). We show through a simple conceptual 7 We ran a regression with country fixed effects, which is presented as Appendix Table A5.…”

“…The Polity Index ranges from -10 to 10, where -10 to -6 indicates an autocracy, -5 to 5 an anocracy, and 6 to 10 a democracy. Bang and Mitra (2013), is a dummy that takes the value of 1 if there has been an intrastate war in the past five years in the country and 0 otherwise, and is defined according to the UCDP data. Geography controls include the median latitude and median longitude of each country, as well as a dummy variable for whether the country is landlocked or not.…”

“…See Defoort (2008). Bang and Mitra (2013), who apply the identification criterion of Fearon and Laitin to disaggregate the UCDP dataset. Conflict variables are dummies that take the value of 1 if there has been an intrastate or ethnic intrastrate war in the past five years in the country and 0 otherwise.…”

“…We reevaluate the hypothesis and empirical result that ethnic civil wars lead to higher skilled emigration (Bang and Mitra, 2013). We develop a simple conceptual framework that predicts contrasting results depending upon if the economy is assumed to be agglomerating in skilled labor or non-agglomerating with network effects.…”

“…As internal conflict reduces the expected returns to educational investment, an educated person will have a higher incentive to migrate. However, there is little empirical evidence on the impact of civil conflict on the migration of skilled labor (an exception is Bang and Mitra, 2013). In this paper, we reevaluate the existing evidence with better data and a more conservative specification, and propose a new framework through which to view the analysis.…”