The mutually reinforcing relation between international migration of highly educated labour force and economic crisis: the case of Greece

Abstract

Although several studies aim at analysing the causes and impacts of the current economic crisis, especially involving the case of Greece, the role that highly educated population holds has not received wider attention. Based on an examination of both secondary data on the Greek economy/labour market and primary data collected by a survey that included 1821 graduates, this paper shows that underutilization of highly educated population harmed the competitiveness of the Greek economy, a factor which has significantly contributed to the creation of the current debt crisis and fostered the migration of graduates.

Keywords:

• economic crisis
• brain drain
• highly skilled migration
• Greece

Notes

1. See http://glossary.uis.unesco.org/glossary/en/term/2048/en.

2. The declining returns to higher education could be also attributed to the fact that in the 1980s the Greek government implemented, first, a generous increase in the minimum wage that affected mainly non-tertiary education graduates and, second,  a ‘sliding wage scaling’ that affected adversely the upper part of the earnings distribution, where most higher education graduates are usually found, thus creating a significant compression in the distribution of wages (Tsakloglou and Cholezas 2001).

3. There were 300,906 university graduates registered as employees in the public sector in July 2010 (public sector census 2010: see http://apografi.gov.gr/2010/07/379) in a total of 889,600 tertiary education graduates who were employed in Greece during the second quarter of the same year (data from Labour Force Survey: http://www.statistics.gr/portal/page/portal/ESYE/PAGE-themes?p_param=A0101).

4. For example, Times-SQ (http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-university-rankings/home) and Academic Ranking of World Universities by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (http://www.arwu.org).

5. See Eurostat: Total GBAORD (Government Budget Appropriations or Outlays on R&D) as a % of total general government expenditure.

6. Greece presents a strong and steady participation in the European Framework-Programmes (FP) during the period 1984–2006. Financing through the FP6 for Greece corresponds to 2.26% of the framework’s total budget, while it represents more than 10% of the total R&D expenditures in Greece, this being one of the highest figures in Europe (European Communities 2009, 30). Thus, the minimal collaboration between universities/research centers and firms could be primarily attributed to the latter’s inability to take advantage of the research outcomes.

7. cf. http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15,291,125,00.html.

8. It should be noted here that these data may be misleading in two ways. First, it is possible that they simply reflect differences regarding the ‘penetration’ of this type of CVs between the European countries. Second, they do not include tertiary education graduates only. However, given that this segment of the labour force is more familiar with ICT applications, such as the Internet and the job mobility portals, we can treat these data as representative of the likelihoods of migration of highly educated-individuals and, surely, not as evidences of migration per se.

9. It should be noted that some of these measures will be promoted through the recent Law 4009/2011 (e.g. dual appointments), while a recent state funded research programme (‘Thales’), encouraged the participation of Greek researchers from foreign universities/research centers.