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The LDCs bear the investment cost of trained manpower that bene- 

 fits the advanced countries. And they can least afford it. Without large 

 talent reserves, without money and institutional resources for attract- 

 ing foreign talent, and faced with competing demands for public and 

 private investments, the LDCs, especially the poorer ones, are not 

 likely to assign a first priority to enlarging domestic output of profes- 

 sionals requiring long and costly training. In such cases, therefore, as 

 the House Government Operations Subcommittee brain drain study 

 concludes, "departure of professionals like scientists, engineers, and 

 physicians is often an 'unrequited' export — an involuntary gift of val- 

 uable resources to other countries." =^' And this "involuntary gift" of 

 manpower, most often produced at government expense and thus much 

 public sacrifice, is in most cases an irremediable loss. The first effect 

 of this loss is to impair national progress and development. As Habib 

 Xaficy pointed out : 



. . . brain drain is a direct threat to the prospects of the country's continued 

 progress. The non-returnees represent a tremendous loss of time and money 

 (invested since birth) in terms of the country's available resources. As a unit 

 necessary to the national development, the highly skilled manpower leaked 

 away in the brain drain means an altogether irreplaceable loss which cannot be 

 compensated some other way. ^" 



LOSS THROUGH "mISMATCH" IN EDUCATION AND TRAINING 



Mismatching advanced education and training with needs has often 

 had detrimental effects which resulted in serious losses to the LDCs. 

 The developing countries lose if the returning professional is unable 

 to match his advanced training with national requirements; finding 

 himself a marginal or superfluous man, he becomes unhappy, and frus- 

 trated, and decides to emigrate permanently.'^^^ And they lose also if 

 the returning professional, overtrained and unsuited to the needs of 

 his environment, moves into activities irrelevant to the basic needs of 

 national development. 



Scientific and technological priorities of the developed countries 

 differ from those of the LDCs, so that scientists and engineers from the 

 LDCs trained in the former are often unable to make an optimum con- 

 tribution in their own developing countries. LDC scientists, specialized 

 in essentially esoteric fields or committed to irrelevant lines of re- 

 search, thereby become unserviceable for other research efforts which 

 might be more immediately helpful for national development. The 

 withdrawal of talent from the national pool in this way obstructs 

 advanced planning for education and training, designed with the 

 requirements of national development in mind, and deters the develop- 



"' Report, Houpe Government Operations Committee, Scientific Brain Drain from the 

 LDCs, 1968, p. 5. ^ . . , 



518 Xaficy, op. clt., pp. 69-70. The U.N. Secretary General also made the point of loss 

 In government Investment In the study on brain drain : "The migration of trained per- 

 sonnel means' the loss to the country of Its expenditure on the person's education and 

 other services provided without the prospect of receiving the benefits of his services. A 

 large part of the cost of education in developing countries Is government-subsidized. 

 Higher education . provided by new nations tends to be costly because of the high cost 

 Involved In equipment, books and teaching staff." (Report of U.N. Secretary General, 

 Outflow of Trained Personnel from LDCs, Nov. 5, 1968, p. 43.) 



Bi» Ell Glnzberg of Columbia Unlver.sity discusses this problem of mismatch in a letter to 

 Congressman Henry S. Reuss. In Hearings, House Government Operations Committee, 

 Brain Drain, 1968, p. 89. 



