From Brain Drain to Brain Gain: Mobilising Albania’s Skilled Diaspora

Policy paper for the Government of Albania in partnership with UNDP Albania (2006)

Studies suggest that about fifty percent of all lecturers, researchers and intellectuals in the country, most of them young and trained in part in Europe, have left Albania since 1990. Nearly 66 percent of those Albanians who have completed a PhD in Western Europe or the US since 1990 have either emigrated from Albania, or never returned after their graduation. This emigration continues even today, with a significant group of talented and successful students remaining abroad after finishing university or post-graduate studies there.

In the 1970s, measures were suggested to protect developing countries from the “brain drain” phenomenon, including the establishment of “a tax on the brain”, and “ethical recruitment” that would prevent recruitment of certain professionals from poor countries, or mooted the idea of compensation to be paid by rich countries to poorer countries for “stealing” their skilled personnel. However, in the context of economic globalization and freedom of the individual, such approaches face significant obstacles. CESS therefore asks a number of rather different questions, including: What conditions need to be created to encourage skilled people to remain in Albania? What can be done to encourage a proportion of talented students to return to Albania after their university graduation? And last but not least, what forms of partnership might be established with Albanian lecturers and researchers working in the universities and research institutions of Europe and USA, so that in the end both sides can enjoy a win-win situation?
 

Brain_Gain_Policy_Paper_english_FINAL.pdf

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