Journal of Population Economics

, Volume 29, Issue 1, pp 293–310 | Cite as

Does corruption promote emigration? An empirical examination

Original Paper
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Abstract

This paper investigates the effects of corruption on the emigration rate of low-, medium- and high-skilled individuals at the country level. Fixed-effects, system generalized method of moments (GMM) and instrumental variable estimations are used to establish a causal relationship between emigration and corruption. The empirical results indicate that as corruption increases, the emigration rate of high-skilled migrants also increases. The emigration rate of individuals with low and medium levels of educational attainment, however, increases at low levels of corruption and then decreases beyond a threshold of 3.4–4.0, where corruption is measured on a scale of 0 (not corrupt) to 10 (totally corrupt). Splitting the sample by income inequality suggests that increased inequality reduces the ability for medium- and low-skilled migrants to emigrate. Therefore, government action should focus on controlling corruption in order to prevent a brain drain.

Keywords

Corruption Emigration Educational attainment 

JEL Classifications

017 05 D78 H2 H11 H26 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the editor of the journal, Klaus Zimmermann, and four anonymous referees for valuable comments; Karin Hosking for editing the paper and Remco Oostendorp for answering queries regarding the OWW database.

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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Nottingham University Business SchoolSemenyihMalaysia
  2. 2.Department of EconomicsJohannes Kepler University of LinzLinzAustria

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