Physician Brain Drain: Does Health Expenditure Matter?

Abstract

Although previous research on migration has documented skilled migrants’cross-border activities very few empirical studies have examined physician migration. Inrecent years, the migration of physicians from developing to developed countries hasreceived a great deal of attention and raised much concern. In this study, a gravity modeland the Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood (PPML) estimator was used to examine theimpact of various health expenditure variables on physician migration to the UnitedStates. The empirical results show that inadequate total expenditure on health, as well asinadequate government and private expenditure on health, encourage physicians fromdeveloping countries to migrate to the United States. (F2; F22)