Brain Gain: Wohin gehen die Wissensträger in Zukunft?

The positive impact of human capital on economic growth has become an almost iron law of economics. The basic argument is that economies with more human capital grow faster and allow people to reach a higher per capita income. The transfer of this theoretically well developed argument into politics leads to a strong influence of public action in the human capital accumulation process. Most of the theoretically identified growth factors lose their empirical power if tougher econometric tests are applied. The direct link between human capital and growth does not really survive hard robustness tests. The assumption gains ground that the impact of human capital on growth is rather indirect and goes over longer life expectancy (due to a better knowledge of every day risks) over improved physical shape of children (due to the food provided by schools) and over the lowered fertility rate (due to the increase of economic power of women). The picture becomes definitely blurred once the international mobility of human capital is taken into account. The (international) mobility of human capital splits off the place of production of human capital and the place where human capital provides a value added. People work in the internet, do electronic commerce, consume in a third place and invest globally, and - probably most important - choose their place of living according to soft factors of local attractiveness (like security in the neighbourhood, clean water and air). A hard (worldwide) competition for the brightest brains emerges. Consequently, good human capital politics means attractiveness of locations. Immobile factors are forced to attract mobile high qualified people, to offer them complementary services and to produce together a high value added. Obviously, for such a brain gain strategy, an attractive local supply of complementary (public) goods is more important than direct (public) subsidies of human capitel accumulation processes.