Leveraging the Global Talent Pool to Jumpstart Prosperity in Emerging Economies

In this project, researchers measure countries’ degree of openness towards different groups of migrants, and test the hypothesis that more developed economies are more open to international migrants, and in particular to international talent.

Project Dates

March 2023–February 2025

Supported By

Templeton World Charity Foundation, Inc.

A key to economic prosperity is the adoption of technology, but technological diffusion is often tied to the knowhow of people that develop and use technology. The most effective way to diffuse technology is to enable people with talent and knowhow to freely move across borders, and freely choose the places where they can be most productive. The cross-border mobility of talent, as well as their economic integration, is oftentimes highly regulated and restricted.

In this research endeavor, we postulate that in developing countries, migration and integration restrictions are more severe and economically more binding. They are economically more binding because these economies suffer from a bigger technological gap and, hence, stand to benefit more from accessing the kind of knowhow that would enable the adoption of technologies. Anecdotal evidence suggests that their restrictions are often biased against high-skilled individuals, limiting the movement of entrepreneurs, professionals, scientists, and inventors. Because most emerging economies are economically less attractive as destinations per se, such barriers may have a larger dissuasive effect on the attraction of global talent.

More About this Project

This study will help us measure countries’ degree of openness towards different groups of migrants, and test the hypothesis that more developed economies are more open to international migrants, and in particular to international talent.

Openness at the border doesn’t necessarily translate into integration inside the country. Countries with similar levels of migrant acceptance can have different success in integrating these migrants. Our project attempts to measure the degree to which countries successfully integrate groups of migrants, and in particularly migrants that can bring about talent and skills into a country.

The objective of this project is to create a validated cross-country dataset of de facto measures of openness to migration and the integration of migrant talent. We use the term de facto to contrast our measures against existing de jure measures of migration policy and migrant integration policies (such as DEMIG, POLMIG, MIPEX and IMPALA). Unlike these existing datasets that assess the restrictiveness of migration laws and policies, our measures aim to capture a revealed preference for migration, as observed in the actual migration patterns of countries. In doing so, we complement existing \textit{de jure} datasets, and offer unique advantages over the existing datasets, such as greater coverage of countries, comparability of the measures over time, and ease of updating the measures as new data become available.

Outputs: We aim to achieve two outcomes: a validated international dataset of de facto measures of openness to migration and the integration of migrant talent, and a working paper that presents a scientific contribution to the understanding of the relationships between openness to the mobility of talent and economic outcomes.

Affiliated Publications

Working Papers
Nedelkoska, L., et al., 2025
De Facto Openness to Immigration
Various factors influence why some countries are more open to immigration than others. Policy is only one of them. We design country-specifc measures of openness to immigration that aim to […]
Download PDF Abstract
Various factors influence why some countries are more open to immigration than others. Policy is only one of them. We design country-specifc measures of openness to immigration that aim to capture de facto levels of openness to immigration, complementing existing de jure measures of immigration, based on enacted immigration laws and policy measures. We estimate these for 148 countries and three years (2000, 2010, and 2020). For a subset of countries, we also distinguish between openness towards tertiary-educated migrants and less than tertiary-educated migrants. Using the measures, we show that most places in the World today are closed to immigration, and a few regions are very open. The World became more open in the first decade of the millennium, an opening mainly driven by the Western World and the Gulf countries. Moreover, we show that other factors equal, countries that increased their openness to immigration, reduced their old-age dependency ratios, and experienced slower real wage growth, arguably a sign of relaxing labor and skill shortages.
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