Jeune Street

As a devotee of The Economist since I was 16, it's exciting to see Exceptional People featured at the front of their book reviews section for the next print issue. This issue isn't on the newsstands yet, but you can read the review online for now. Here's the opening section:

When a Bangladeshi man goes to work on a construction site in the Middle East, his wife typically moves in with her husband’s family. Not all wives enjoy this. They sweat in a strange kitchen, take care of a bossy mother-in-law and see their husbands only for a few weeks each year. And although their husbands send home plenty of money, they often send it to their parents, not their wives. Migration creates losers as well as winners.

But the gains vastly outweigh the losses, as Ian Goldin, Geoffrey Cameron and Meera Balarajan make plain in their new book, “Exceptional People”. If rich countries were to admit enough migrants from poor countries to expand their own labour forces by a mere 3%, the world would be richer, according to one estimate, by $356 billion a year. Completely opening borders would add an astonishing $39 trillion over 25 years to the global economy. That is more than 500 times the amount the rich world spends on foreign aid each year. Migration is the most effective tool yet devised for reducing global poverty.

It's encouraging to see The Economist highlight the book, especially its arguments that the benefits of greater mobility for humanity far outweigh the costs. In fact, one of the questions I most often get from friends when discussing the book is about 'brain drain'. There is a nice summary piece on the current literature on brain drain and 'brain gain' in the same issue of The Economist:

Several economists reckon that the brain-drain hypothesis fails to account for the effects of remittances, for the beneficial effects of returning migrants, and for the possibility that being able to migrate to greener pastures induces people to get more education. Some argue that once these factors are taken into account, an exodus of highly skilled people could turn out to be a net benefit to the countries they leave. Recent studies of migration from countries as far apart as Ghana, Fiji, India and Romania have found support for this “brain gain” idea.