On the Sustainable Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: Do Remittances, Human Capital Flight, and Brain Drain Matter?

Abstract

To solve the active macroeconomic challenges of remittances, human capital flight, and brain drain facing Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) from the perspective of costs and benefits tradeoffs for achieving Sustainable Development Goal eight (SDGs-8) targets by 2030 and the recipient communities’ wellbeing, this study investigates the sustainable economic growth in SSA: Do remittances, human capital flight, and brain drain matter? Autoregressive-Distributive Lag (ARDL) and the Error-Correction Mechanism (ECM) were used. Thus, this research is led by push–pull, altruism, and social network theories. The ARDL showed that remittances and trade positively affect economic growth. However, human capital flight, poverty, corruption, and inequality negatively affect economic growth. The co-efficient of ECTt−1 is ascertained to be negative (−0.266282) with a significant statistical value of 1% (i.e., 0.0123). Therefore, the annual requirement to restore equilibrium convergence is 26.62%. The study concludes that SSA may achieve their sustainable economic growth target, particularly by formalizing remittances and human capital flight and brain drain into the financial, economic system in SSA by 2030, since restoration to long-term convergence will take less than nine years. Enabling a labor market that offers decent work and wages, along with trade and remittance policies for sustainable growth, are recommended.

Promoting Renewable Energy Consumption in Sub-Saharan Africa: How Capital Flight Crowds Out the Favorable Effect of Foreign Aid

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Competitiveness of higher education systems: Exploring the role of migration flow

“…Specifically, the emigration of highly skilled Chinese individuals fosters connections between China and their destination country. Past studies (Miyagiwa, 1991;Usman et al, 2022;El Morabety and El Morabety, 2022) have confirmed the hypothesis that brain drain enhances the education and income of migration destination countries. Additionally, technology and knowledge transfer due to circular migration increases labour productivity and the quality of education in the destination country.…”

Study on the Spatial and Temporal Evolution of High-Quality Development in Nine Provinces of the Yellow River Basin

“…Many countries around the world have made different efforts to achieve sustainable development [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42], and high-quality development represents active exploration of sustainable development in China. As the Yellow River Basin is an important ecological barrier and economic zone in China, this paper is devoted to the study of HQD in the YRB.…”

“…Singh [35] argued that developing countries, such as Saudi Arabia, should continuously enhance their human capital through targeted education and training programs in order to achieve sustainable development goals. Usman [36] argued that human capital outflow remains a serious challenge for developing countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, and that policy makers should pursue effective measures to reduce human capital outflow from the region. Several studies have discussed the impact of external linkages on sustainable development.…”