Education and Immigration: Substitutes or Complements? A Case-Study of Medical Doctors

About this event

This event is part of the IMI Seminar Series, Michaelmas term 2014.

This talk analyses the linkages between immigration and educational system by focusing on the particular case of medical doctors. We use the bilateral panel dataset developed by Bhargava et al. (2011) to measure the emigration of physicians from 192 source countries to 17 OECD destination countries between 1991 and 2004. Firstly, a traditional gravity-equation model has been implemented to principally determine the predominant pull and push factors for physicians migration.

Demographic factors such as the age composition of labour force and dependency ratio seems to play an important role in determining migration. In the second part of the analysis, we focus our attention on the receiving countries and estimate whether migration in_ows should be considered as a substitute or complement of the number of medical graduates trained. This paper includes predictions where 3 scenarios could be simulated. (1)One scenario could considered a fixed number of medical graduates and only recruitment of foreign trained doctors could change over time. (2)Second scenario is the opposite to the previous one where medical graduates could vary but foreign trained physicians is remained constant. (3) The last scenario considers a mixed approach where medical graduates and foreign trained physicians could be both considered as flexible. This paper concludes about the implication of immigration on the design of educational system into destination countries.