Influencing mechanism of the flow of high-skilled talents on technological evolution in emerging countries
Globalization has resulted in a notable rise in highly-skilled talent flows from emerging to developed countries.Highly-skilled talents introduce external information,skills,and tacit knowledge,and provide impetus for technological path-breaking processes.Although the impacts of highly-skilled immigrants on economic growth,exports,and the social welfare of receiving countries have been widely studied,little research has been done to date on the influences on sending countries.This paper contributes to the limited existing literature by analysing the relationship between the migration of inventors and technological evolution in sending countries based on the OECD REGPAT database.This relates to the hypothesis that the mobility of talents from emerging to developed countries can bring back external knowledge and technologies,hence facilitating sending countries'technological path-breaking process.The findings of this paper include:(1)The technological development of emerging countries is a path-dependent process,as countries often branch into new technologies that are related to their preexisting knowledge base.As a result of knowledge feedback from highly-skilled talents,the probability of sending countries to develop unrelated technologies increases.(2)The mobility of talents across countries contributes to more international collaborations and citations for patents that are unrelated to the local knowledge base,thus enriching the technological paths of sending countries.(3)The mobility of highly-skilled talents typically affects complex technologies,which have strong economic effects that provide an impetus for other countries to imitate.And the effect on novel technologies is not significant,due to their high geographical sticky characteristics.In general,this paper highlights the importance of highly-skilled talent outflows on the technological evolution of emerging countries,then offers some policy implications for migration and innovation.Besides,there are issues about the regional consequences of talent mobility for future research to explore.
talent flowtechnological evolutionpath-breakingmechanism researchemerging countries
万方数据
维普
