1701 Britain's new brain drain gathers pace

I read this thought provoking article in the Independent on my way over to Italy on Tuesday - what do the èmigrès think?

Britain's new brain drain gathers pace

If you work in the vicinity of London's Canary Wharf, as I do, you could reasonably draw the conclusion that the whole world has come to work in Britain. Here it is almost as common to hear French, Italian, German and even Russian spoken in the bars and shopping malls as English. What's more, these newly arrived seem to be the cream of their generation - bright young middle class-types, drawn like bees to the honey trap of London's boom in investment banking.

They are very welcome, the more so as it seems the reverse brain drain - that is, the number of graduates leaving these shores to work overseas - is a much more prevalent phenomenon.

According to a report by the World Bank, nearly one-sixth of Britain's stock of working age, British born graduates - or 1.44 million - live and work overseas, which is proportionately more than anywhere else in the world. What's more, recent figures from the Office for National Statistics appear to confirm the numbers are on a rising trend.

If immigration into Britain is at a record, so too is the number of Britons leaving these shores for a better life overseas. The new additions tend to be unskilled. The losses tend to be the highly skilled and educated.

Is this a good or a bad thing? One of the report's authors, Frédéric Docquier, draws the obvious conclusion that it must be bad for a country to lose the economic benefit of those it has so expensively educated and trained, yet I'm not sure he's entirely right about this.

In the developing and Third world, high levels of emigration arguably bring a net economic gain, since those who leave tend to remit so much. The social cost may be another matter, but in general the amounts that can be earned overseas are much higher than back home, creating a big inflow of wealth. Even for a developed country, to lose so many graduates may not be as harmful as it seems. Well-educated Britons are in general leaving to work overseas not because they have to but because they can. They speak the language of international business,and are in demand the world over. Britain is a small and overcrowded island. It is also rich, culturally vibrant and economically productive, so it is only natural that human capital should be one of its biggest exports.

As Ireland has discovered, it is actually extremely helpful economically to have a large and growing overseas diaspora. Many of these people will eventually return, bringing new skills, wealth and a different set of perceptions with them, even those who don't tend to retain a residual affection for the old place, which enormously enhances the country's political and cultural position in the world.

Nor is this latest bout of graduate emigration like any of the previous, economically or disaster-driven waves of emigration from Britain. With greatly enhanced mobility, we are seeing the beginnings of a genuinely global market in skills. It is only natural graduates should be in its vanguard.

Unfortunately, you can always have too much of a good thing, and if graduates are leaving because rates of pay and tax are becoming uncompetitive, then in the long term that spells big trouble. The evidence suggests this is not yet the case - lifestyle, opportunity and adventure are more frequent determinants - but it could easily become so.

j.warner@ independent.co.uk