Innovation and International High Skilled Migration

Abstract

The international mobility of highly skilled employees in the last few decades has become an essential part of an economy. Simultaneously innovation and its' components have a large effect on the migration of skilled people. The goal of this paper is finding out if a greater degree of innovation in a country has a positive impact on the arrival of highly skilled immigrants. In order to achieve the aforementioned goal and following existing literature on the subject, an analysis on an international level was made regarding the effect of relevant innovation factors (number of patents; research and development funding (as % of GDP) and number of articles in scientific and technical journals) on immigration of highly skilled employees. The results of a regression analysis confirmed a significant relation between the number of patents, articles in scientific and technical journals and number of highly skilled immigrants (HQI). This means that countries with a relatively larger amount of the innovation factors have a great incentive that attracts talented people on an international scale, although in order to achieve this there is the need to promote and maintain a favourable institutional, economic and technological environment.

How the Level of Economic Growth and the Constituent Elements of Innovation Attract International Talent?

“…Innovation and its constituent elements have a major impact on the migration flows of highly skilled workers (Mihi-Ramirez et al, 2016;Bosetti et al, 2015;Zheng & Ejermo, 2015;Masuduzzaman, 2014). In particular, a greater degree of innovation in a country and greater economic growth could boost the arrival of HSI, which is the general hypothesis of this research.…”

“…Another main constituent element of innovation is the dissemination of all novel and recent knowledge and technologies (Eurostat and OECD, 2005;Schumpeter, 1934;), accounting for the number of articles published in scientific journals (Mihi-Ramirez et al, 2016;Stephan & Levin, 2001).…”

“…Patents and data on citations are constituent elements of innovation very useful to assess and share technological changes (Mihi-Ramirez et al, 2016;Jaffe & Trajtenberg, 2002). Abdelbaki (2009) showed the relationship between increased presence of foreign graduates and growth in patent production.…”

“…It is especially important in times of recession and global competition like we are currently experiencing (Mihi-Ramirez et al, 2016;Bosetti et al, 2015;Naghavi & Strozzi, 2015;OECD, 2015;Abdelbaki, 2009;Jaffe et al, 1993). This fact requires studies on the international level in order to understand the global changes that are happening (Arslan et al, 2014).…”

Are They Deterred by Welfare? Digging into the Drivers of Highly Skilled Temporary and Long‐term Migrants in Europe

“…Other type of returns to education also favour the arrival of HSMs (Belot and Hatton, 2012), such as employment opportunities (Cadena and Kovak, 2016), flexibility in the recognition of educational credentials and economic freedom (Nejad and Young, 2016;Meierrieks and Renner, 2017) and unregulated liberalized labour markets (Doomernik et al, 2009). Finally, recent research has also studied the potential of innovative economies to attract talent when there are stable institutional settings, favorable technical environments (Mihi-Ramirez et al, 2016), open trade and faster growth of information and communication technologies (Michaels et al, 2013).…”