“Brain Gain” educated professionals begin to stay home in poor nations

For many years the poor countries were unable to keep any educated residents from leaving for better opportunity. This "brain drain" further crippled the economies of the poor nations, as the educated would take their knowledge and earnings elsewhere. This trend is beginning to reverse and it will be great news for the fortunes of poor nations.

The "brain gain" trend is being helped by the recent global recession as the educated are finding economic opportunity dwindling in rich nations. As these people return home, their return has a ripple effect on the rest of their homeland.


The Christian Science Monitor has a great look at this new trend called "brain gain". A summary of their story is made on the video below. 

The search for the next IMF chief is on

With the sexual assault allegations put against former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn the time has come to find another leader for the international bank. Again, the push is on from developing countries to have the new IMF chief be from somewhere other than Europe. However the US and the EU; who have all of the voting power on selecting the new head, are still unlikely to look for candidates elsewhere.

From the Guardian, writer Jayati Ghosh looks into the selection process and why Europe is using some faulty logic for keeping the appointment within their borders.

European governments have quickly rallied around the candidacy of Christine Lagarde, finance minister of France, for the top job at the IMF. For obvious reasons, this is not popular in the capital cities of major developing countries playing a more important role on the world stage.

For more than 60 years now convention, rather than any written rules, has dictated that the appointment of heads of the Bretton Woods institutions has been controlled by the traditional global powers. The US has provided the chief of the World Bank and Europe has provided the head of the IMF. These "conventions" emerged and were entrenched during a period when these two broad groupings controlled the global economy, and polity.

That is much less clear today. The medium-term future of the world economy is unlikely to be scripted only by these two players. Before the emergency exit of Dominique Strauss-Kahn had rendered the choice of the next head of the IMF an urgent matter, it was common to hear voices from developed countries suggesting that the next person to be in charge could and should be someone from the developing world. There is certainly no shortage of suitable candidates with sufficient international experience and knowledge of the workings of international finance.

In this context, the speed and strength of insistence with which European countries are pushing for a particular European candidate is notable. Even the support of the UK prime minister, David Cameron, for Lagarde cannot simply be ascribed to his dislike of Gordon Brown. The reason is not just because of European governments' perceived desire to retain some semblance of control over global institutions. It is also because the major immediate work of the IMF is to do with Europe: several European countries are involved in economic rescue packages worked out with the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the IMF – and others are likely to be waiting in the queue.

The argument being made is that since European countries are likely to be involved in bailout packages in the immediate future, it is especially important to have a European to head the Fund. Yet this was precisely the argument used – by Europeans – against having a person from the developing world to lead the institution: that debtor countries could not and should not provide the leadership because of possible conflicts of interest! Once European debtor countries are involved, apparently the inverse logic holds.

Africa now has less say in World Bank decisions

Voting power in the World Bank has changed to reflect the GDP of individual countries. The World Bank says that emerging nations now have more voting power and influence in Bank decisions. This is great for countries like China, India and Brazil, but Sub-Saharan Africa has lost some of it's voting power.

From the IPS, writer Hilaire Avril has this summary of the changes.

Eighteen sub-Saharan countries have thus lost a measure of their already modest influence in the institution’s decision-making process. Nigeria and South Africa are hardest hit, their voting powers having been decreased by about 10 percent.

Only oil-rich Sudan - whose president has been indicted by the International Criminal Court on suspicion of war crimes - has seen its share of votes increase.

The World Bank, internationally mandated with financing development projects, has long been criticised by civil society and recipient countries as unrepresentative of those it claims to be helping. Sub-Saharan Africa, the target of many of its "poverty reduction" programmes, retains a total of less than six percent of the institution’s voting rights.

Finally responding to critics, the Bank has in recent years indicated some intention towards reforming its governance and making it more inclusive of its purported beneficiaries. Its Istanbul Declaration of October 2009 committed to "protect the voting power of the smallest poor countries".

But on Apr 25, it shuffled voting rights to increase the share of China (by 1.64 percent), South Korea (0.58 percent), Turkey (0.55 percent), Mexico (0.5 percent), and Singapore (0.24 percent). According to the Bank’s own economic definitions, South Korea and Singapore are high-income countries, whereas Mexico and Turkey are upper middle-income countries.

Criticising the adjustments, head of research for anti-poverty campaigner Oxfam, Duncan Green, noted in a blog entry titled "The World Bank breaks its promises on Africa’s voting power" that "the reform reflects the shift in global GDP (gross domestic product), and so benefits the big emerging economies, not the slower growing economies in Africa".

Adds Sebastien Fourmy, who follows global financial institutions at Oxfam’s French chapter: "This reform is an attempt at making nice with the main emerging world players, such as China and Brazil, in the hope that they will contribute a larger share of the Bank’s funding.

"This comes at a point where Europe has growing difficulties in meeting its financial commitments to development," he explains. "European countries have therefore agreed to a minor reduction in their voting powers but most are still clinging to their chairs."