Ehui Adovor - The Medical Brain Drain

Le Recteur de l'Université catholique de Louvain fait savoir que

Ehui Adovor

soutiendra publiquement sa dissertation

The Medical Brain Drain

Who, Why and What Implications for human development ?

pour l'obtention du grade de Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion

 Abstract

Physician’s migration is a complex and thorny issue that occupies center stage and provokes intense debates in the scientific and policy arenas for a number of reasons. First, physicians are considered the most highly mobile of high-skilled migrants. Some countries experiencing a high proportion of emigration of their physicians also face the largest needs-based shortages of health workers in the world, with concerns their migration may further exacerbating these shortages and skew the distribution of physicians in origin countries. Second, a large proportion of physicians are often trained using public subsidies to education with concerns about the effects of their emigration on the public finance of origin countries. While burgeoning empirical research has made ample strides to understand the magnitude of physician’s migration, their determinants, and implications for development outcomes, a large gap remains--complicated by the lack of data, especially from low-income countries which are most affected.

My research set out to understand questions around physicians migration by; (i) developing a new panel dataset documenting dyadic stock of medical doctors to enable cross-country analysis and identification of the determinants of the medical brain drain over a long period of time; ((ii) assess the implications of the medical brain drain on human development globally and (iii) examine the relationship between the quality of doctors and their propensity to emigrate using a new and unique dataset of doctors from Ghana.

Les membres du jury :

Prof. Sandy Tubeuf (UCLouvain), co-promotrice et secrétaire du jury

Prof. Frederic Docquier (LISER, Luxembourg), co-promoteur

Prof. William Parenté (UCLouvain), présidente du jury

Prof. Florence Jusot (Université Paris-Dauphiné – PSL, France), évaluateur externe

Prof. Xavier Chojnick (Université de Lille, France), évaluateur externe