Editorial | The region’s brain-drain

While he appears not to have offered specific solutions to the problem, this newspaper supports Wayne Henry’s call for coordinated action by Caribbean governments to slow, if not reverse, the outflow of the region’s most educated people to developed countries.

On that score, The Gleaner has a few obvious suggestions, of which, we are sure, Dr Henry, the director general of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ), is already fully aware.

If we were cynical, perhaps at the top of the list would be that Caribbean governments should contrive to keep Donald Trump as the president of the United States in perpetuity.

Mr Trump’s America First policies, and his obvious aversion to people of a certain hue, would help to keep more Jamaican and Caribbean nationals at home, even among those with the capacity to clear the immigration hurdles. Moreover, a long-term Trump presidency would probably render America an economically less-attractive place for foreigners.

MUST ACCOMPLISH

Speculation and fantasy aside, there are two things Caribbean governments can, and must accomplish, in the short to medium term, to entice their nationals to stay at home, or in the region.

First, they have to escape the trap of economic stagnation to achieve reasonable and, critically, sustained growth. Second, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the regional organisation, has to accelerate its programme to establish a CARICOM Single Market and Economy, especially the free movement of labour.

A third matter for regional governments to tackle with some urgency is criminal violence, particularly homicides, against which Jamaica has recently been making headway.

According to the government’s Jamaica Information Service, Dr Henry addressed the question of the Caribbean’s brain-drain at a recent forum on the migration of skilled people, co-hosted by the World Bank and the PIOJ.

In Jamaica’s case, the country’s changing demographic profile made the current challenges of outward migration, especially of its most educated people, “greater now than at any other point in our history”.

“Our school-age and our working-age population are declining in all our countries,” the PIOJ director general said. “The elderly age group, 60 years and over, is the fastest growing segment of our population, so compounding our challenges to provide a sustainable social protection system.”

A 2006 IMF working paper on education and the brain-drain in the Caribbean found that in the 35 years to 2000, the Caribbean had lost 12 per cent of its labour force to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a wealthy-nations club. That, proportionally, was significantly higher than most regions of the world.

SITUATION WORSE

But the situation was worse with respect to the region’s most educated people, those with more than 12 years of education; the average was 70 per cent, with most countries being over 50 per cent.

Jamaica (85 per cent) ranked only after Guyana (89 per cent) in this outward trek of its most-educated, and was tied with Grenada.

Seventy-eight per cent of the tertiary-educated Jamaican migrants went to the United States, compared to the regional average of 61 per cent.

It is hardly likely, except in the case of Guyana, where the discovery of oil has led to a recent economic boom, that much has changed since the IMF study.

So, as Dr Henry observed, there is a need for new strategies to reverse this crisis.

He said, “The traditional approaches that the region has generally implemented to retain its high-skilled human resources have literally failed to produce the intended results. The major challenge for us today is how to design policies and programmatic responses to make migration, high-skilled migration in particular, work for the sustainable development of all our countries.”

At the forefront of these economic responses must be economic growth. People leave Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean hoping, primarily, to improve their economic circumstances.

Indeed, for over four decades, Jamaica’s annual average expansion of GDP was one per cent. After a dozen years working at macro-economic stability, growth remains stagnant to sluggish, although unemployment has plummeted to a historic low of 3.5 per cent. Labour productivity, clearly, has fallen.

At the regional level, CARICOM’s failure to advance economic integration has limited any insulation the community might provide itself against a hostile global environment. This is especially obvious in its floundering on the free movement of labour and part of the proposed establishment of a single economic space.

Mr Trump’s policies in the United States, which leave countries, such as those in the Caribbean as potential collateral damage in a hostile environment, underscored the value of regional integration; the sum of CARICOM being greater than its individual parts.

That’s an important part of our takeaway from Dr Henry’s intervention on the brain-drain question.