Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
-
Competing interests None.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
-
↵i Bhargava also criticizes my parenthetical remark that his study with Docquier's finds that the emigration of physicians is sometimes negatively correlated with adult deaths. I am still unclear on why Bhargava believes that this remark is a misrepresentation. In his response, Bhargava writes that the net effect of medical brain drain on adult deaths due to AIDS was negative (−0.005) when computed at the start of the sample in 1991 when the sample mean of HIV prevalence rates was 2.98%. Michael Clemens notes: ‘Bhargava and Docquier find that the fraction of physicians abroad has …a negative and significant effect on AIDS deaths in countries where HIV prevalence is low.’18 I would be curious to know if Bhargava thinks that Clemens’ claim is mistaken.
-
↵ii An objector might argue that we are also unable to infer that the emigration of health workers does not cause harmful health outcomes from the other studies that I cite. After all, these studies have problems too. It is true that I am unable to rule out the possibility that the other studies that I cite are flawed. Nonetheless, it seems to me that the balance of evidence at least casts doubt on the claim that the emigration of health workers from low-income countries generally enables serious harm, even if these studies fail to conclusively establish this claim.
Linked Articles
- Feature article
- Commentary
- Commentary
- Commentary
- Commentary
- Commentary
- Concise argument
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- The active recruitment of health workers: a defence
- The active recruitment of health workers: a commentary
- A global affair
- Importance of accounting for loss to follow-up when comparing mortality between immigrants and long-term residents: a population-based retrospective cohort
- Glossary: migration and health
- Adding insult to injury: the healthcare brain drain
- We want to help: ethical challenges of medical migration and brain waste during a pandemic
- Advancing migration and health research by examining return migration
- Managing medical migration from poor countries
- Income mortality paradox by immigrants’ duration of residence in Sweden: a population register-based study