Does corruption promote emigration? An empirical examination

Cooray, Arusha;Schneider, Friedrich

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.

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Journal of Population Economics

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1432-1475

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Springer

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DOI

10.1007/s00148-015-0563-y