Preface and acknowledgments

In 2007, Member States of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) adopted forty-five recommendations under the organization's development agenda. Recommendation 39 highlighted the brain drain faced by many developing economies. In consequence, WIPO's Economics and Statistics Division was eventually tasked with studying the linkages between skilled migration, innovation, and intellectual property (IP). This was a difficult brief. Economists have long recognized that migration influences the level and composition of workers' skills in the economy. The prominence of foreign-born scientists and engineers in fast-growing technology companies - especially in the United States - has also drawn significant attention. Clearly, these relationships raise important questions. How damaging is the brain drain for sending economies - both in the short and long run? Is skilled migration a straightforward win for receiving economies, or might it inhibit skills development and depress wages among domestic workers? Yet, generating systematic evidence on how skilled migration affects innovation and knowledge diffusion runs into numerous methodological and data-related limitations. Introducing IP as an additional element to consider makes the analytical challenge even greater. However, after some exploration, it turned out that WIPO was sitting on a treasure trove of unexploited data on migrant inventors - namely, inventors listed in close to five million patent applications filed under WIPO's Patent Cooperation Treaty System. This discovery turned what initially seemed like a daunting mandate into an exciting and rewarding research project. Our investigations into the causes and consequences of inventor mobility coincided with heightened interest by policymakers seeking to attract educated workers as a way of easing domestic skills shortages and fostering innovation and entrepreneurship. Academic literature on the topic was also burgeoning, spurred in part by new migration databases becoming available to researchers. As part of its study mandate, WIPO organized a workshop in 2013 bringing together some of the most prominent academic scholars studying skilled migration and representatives from various international organizations that conduct research in this area. Drawing on state-of-the-art data, the workshop reviewed the main trends and patterns of skilled-worker mobility.