Brain Drain with a Brain Gain?: a Search for Evidence of Beneficial Brain Drain: Emigration of the Ethnic Hungarian Minority from Romania

The importance of human capital accumulation in long-run economic growth, emphasized by modern endogenous growth theory, qualifies brain drain - skilled migration from developing to developed countries - as a constraint on the rise of economies lagging behind. This phenomenon, noticed as early as the 1960s and growing in importance with globalization, hits even harder in case of an ethnic minority, where not only economic growth, but the simple survival of the minority is at stake. Recent studies offer, on the other hand, a new perspective on brain drain, raising the possibility of an indirect beneficial effect, a so-called brain gain, through educational incentives, income distribution dynamics, diaspora networks, remittances and return migration. My search for evidence of brain gain in the case of the Hungarian ethnic minority of Romania gives a negative result. My findings are, however, in line with the necessary conditions of beneficial brain drain established by Beine et al. The analysis should be especially useful to professionals studying the nature and effects of international migration, in a narrower range to those specialized in ethnic minorities of Romania.