Oceania (L) Africa (R)

In Europe, UK, Germany, France, Italy have the biggest movements. UK has a majority inbound while Italy has majority outbound.

In Oceania, most of researchers movement are from NZ to Australia.

In Africa, South Africa has more inflow of researchers from the region. Botswana has more influx than outflow too.

Inter-continent Movements

We can see the movement isn’t limited to developing countries to developed countries — researchers from developed countries may move on to work and live in other countries too.

Brain Drain or New Blood?

To understand the inbound vs outbound, I calculated these 3 metrics: outbound/inbound ratio, % of all researchers that moved out of a country and % of all researchers that moved in.

We use the height to indicate outbound/inbound ratio of migrations, and use the size of upward/downward triangle to show outbound/inbound move as % of all recorded researchers to normalize over population effect, for all countries with above-average movement counts.

Besides India, China has 2nd highest ratio, losing 5X more talents than gaining them. And Greek researchers have highest percentage of migrating out of the country.

In terms of attracting researchers, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are getting the most influx compared to very little outbound move. Singapore and HK in Asia are also attracting 2–3X more researchers than losing them.

Where did the migrated researchers do their PhDs

Among the migrated researchers, if we look at whether the researchers did their PhD in their earliest affiliated countries or latest ones by the earliest continents, we can see Asian/African researchers mostly continued to do research in their PhD countries, whereas American/Europeans moved after obtaining PhD.

Overall 49% of migrated researchers did their phDs in the earliest country, 39% in their latest country, 12% elsewhere.