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U.S. hold on the global market for knowledge starts to slip
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NEW YORK- The world is a global marketplace. Money flows like water across national borders, creating a perpetual motion machine of investment, development and wealth creation. Theoretically, it is a system in which everybody wins.
The global market for knowledge and expertise, by contrast, has developed far less rapidly, and thus far has produced only one big winner: the United States.
Information technology generates about one-third of the economic growth in the United States with just 5 million workers, said Lindsay Lowell, director of research at Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International Migration. And more than 1 million of those people are foreign born. But America is beginning to lose its monopoly on the world's best brains. From Ireland to India, South Korea to South Africa, and Australia to Albania, said Allan Findlay, a geographer and the director of the Center for Applied Population Research at the University of Dundee in Scotland, resources are being poured into retaining native talent.
Australia, for example, recently announced a ＄ 2 billion package of research grants, tax breaks and new education funding to attract and retain technical talent. Japan has budgeted billions of dollars to increase information technology development and retain workers across Asia.
Scientific knowledge and technical skill have become so essential to the economic future of nations that the migration of skilled workers has come under intense scrutiny. Transilience, which means to leap across, is now used to describe what Mr. Lowell calls “ brain currents,” the movement of educated individuals, like a new form of currency, around the globe.
In the competition for the best and brightest, the cost to the losers can be devastating. For example, a study by the Colombian government estimated that the country lost tens of thousands of people with three years or more of higher education in 1999 alone, said Jean-Baptiste Meyer, a senior researcher at the Institut de Recherche pour le Developpement in Paris.
Mr. Meyer added that losses of the most highly skilled people from Colombia and South Africa, which he has also studied, are accelerating as international head-hunting companies have become active there.
“ These countries are thus under tremendous pressures on their skilled populations,” Mr. Meyer wrote in an e-mail message from Colombia.
The same is true of India and Asia, where local job markets often can absorb only a fraction of the scientists and engineers produced every year.
Rather than fight transilience, a number of countries are trying to benefit from it by keeping their borders open to technically advanced workers. In the short term, this may encourage scientists to leave their native lands for the United States or Europe, but they may return later, with extensive professional networks and far greater experience than they would have had otherwise.
Take India, which may have the world's largest diaspora of scientists. IndUS Entrepreneurs, a group whose members include the leading Indian software engineers in Silicon Valley, estimates that 30 percent of the software engineers there are of Indian origin. And AnnaLee Saxenian, an economist at Berkeley, has used a Dun Bradstreet database to count 750 Silicon Valley companies run by Indians.
On the other side of the ledger, though, India appears to have benefited enormously from its far-flung citizens. The worth of India's information-technology exports has catapulted, to ＄ 4 billion in 2000 from just ＄ 150 million in 1990. And the Indian government projects that by 2008 that number will be ＄ 85 billion.
Sheer wealth and unmatched research infrastructure continue to make the United States the mecca of scientists and engineers. Data from the National Science Foundation show that, except for a brief dip mid-decade, students from the top exporters of talent in Asia enrolled in U.S. graduate programs in increasing numbers during the 1990s.
Last year, about 75 000 students were in the United States from China and India alone. The most recent figures also show that there are about 20 000 students in the United States at any given time from the three largest European exporters, Germany, Britain and France.
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