Facing the Brain Drain: a Road to Sustainable Talent Circulation in the EU

Source: Pixabay

Europe has always prided itself in being a beacon of open borders and free movement of its people. The latter is, after all, one of the cornerstones of the European Union’s identity, enshrined in the Schengen Agreement and its policy framework. A free movement of people strengthens cultural exchange and cooperation between Member States, allowing for a stabilizing interdependence to temper individual interests. It is the best antidote to help correct any labor failures, as the flexibility of movement guarantees a way to face shortages in critical sectors, skill mismatching and demographic challenges. It is a necessary pillar to support a functioning internal market that drives innovation and competition. 

And yet, the resulting circulation of talent yields, along with many benefits, also some drawbacks. Flows of talented individuals within the EU borders tend to follow established patterns that usually see a permanent emigration of skilled workers leaving their home regions in favor of more rewarding opportunities elsewhere. 

Many are the factors that can make a region unappealing to its workforce: structural youth unemployment, education quality, poor working conditions. 

These issues most often plague the southern and eastern countries of the Union, the ones unsurprisingly most affected by the phenomenon of talent emigration: for instance, out of all the people in the EU that in 2022 left their home country for work, more than a quarter was from Romania, 12% came from Poland, 10% from Italy. Greece’s outflow finds roots in corruption and political distrust in the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, while Latvia suffers from strong wage disparities that discourage its workers. 

At the same time, the proportion of people emigrating with high academic qualifications has increased - the people leaving are young, educated, and looking for better prospects and living standards. 

As these movements of people perpetuate and strengthen in their direction, the inequalities within EU that had borne the emigration in the first place only worsen: skilled professional loss causes slowdowns in economic growth, but also the capacity for a country to pursue innovation. Indeed, a significant portion of the emigrants in question usually possess a tertiary education in medical, research, mechanical engineering, and ICT fields. 

The widening disparity ends up conflicting with one of the other basic tenets of the European Union: that of achieving economic, social and territorial convergence across Member States through efficient cohesion policies, both at regional and national level.

On a cultural level, not intervening to reverse the brain drain may eventually make it so conventional a phenomenon, and so socially accepted within the affected communities, that emigration is eventually perceived as the only chance for a successful career.

Addressing the brain drain in the EU poses a significant challenge, considering it is an age old problem: the truth is that wherever there exists regional socio-economic imbalance there exists a risk of a brain drain phenomenon, and in that regard the EU still has a lot of ground to cover, considering that around 25% of its population lives in regions whose income is below 75% of the EU average. 

A joint effort between the European Union and the European Members, between the supranational and the local level, is required. It’s for this reason that the EU Commission has created in 2015 the Horizon Policy Support Facility, which gives practical support to Member States to design and implement reforms in the research and innovation sectors, to make them more competitive places of work and productivity growth. Additionally, the EU pursues several initiatives to tackle demographic changes. In 2020, the Joint Action Plan was born, to support cities and regions in handling brain drain, educational inequality and reinforcing local and regional innovation, research, education and culture ties with the aim of enhancing the resilience and competitiveness of the EU. Other objectives are closing the regional innovation gap, fostering interconnected innovation ecosystems, and aiding the European Education Area – all aiming to curb brain drain from less developed areas.

The plan includes localized approaches that recognize the importance of acting at the level closest to the citizen, i.e. the local one. One of these approaches is the Partnerships for Regional Innovation for green and digital transformation, that support wider regional strategies relevant to EU priorities. These are meant to enable regions to deal with local problems while using EU resources, and balances opportunities around Europe. Its pillar is that “All territories have an innovation potential that needs to be tapped”. Projects like this one seek to develop partnerships between private firms, local authorities and universities, in order to craft engines for local growth and development that can restart the regions affected by emigration. 

There have also been purely national initiatives, realized often within the framework of the Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRPs). For example, Latvia has tried to reform its higher education system to make it more competitive compared to the market offering in Europe. Lithuania instead started offering funds to researchers working in foreign institutions to come to their own universities, in order to attract skilled minds in their territories. Romania instead looked for increasing reliance on the Horizon PSF and a stronger focus on merit-based funding.

Another aspect looks directly at engagement of Member countries with their diaspora communities, for instance through exchange programmes, mentorship schemes and entrepreneurship programmes. Not only can governments interact with the emigrated communities with the final objective of encouraging return to the home country, but also to transform this loss into an added value. An example is Ireland’s Diaspora Strategy of 2020-2025, which paints the Irish diaspora as an important resource for the nation and a defining part of a more global Irish identity, that can be a treasure of invaluable expertise and insights into trade, industry and innovation across the world. 

The end objective of all these initiatives is thus not to prevent movement, but to make it circular: this is how we move from a brain drain to a brain circulation, which ideally makes the best use of the EU unique environment of free movement to create a dynamic exchange of talent, skills and knowledge across borders; to turn the diaspora talent lost abroad into leverage for growth and development for each Member State.