Without any empirical justification, it has been advocated that export of skilled manpower will bring economic prosperity. However, Alam and Haque (2010) have empirically proved that the 'brain drain' from a developing nation provides neither economic nor social benefits. They have observed that the 'body drain' may provide a little economic gain at the cost of social problems in both the exporting and importing countries.
Without comparing the productivity of workers from Bangladesh and the Philippines, some argue that those from the Philippines earn more than their Bangladeshi counterparts because of their higher skills. But they fail to realise the fact that the people from the Philippines and those from Bangladesh work in different sectors, not in the same sector. The people from the Philippines are mostly women, predominantly working in the tourism and entertainment sectors and their income slabs are far different from those of the Bangladeshis who work in other sectors. Bangladeshis may not perform well in the sectors the Filipinos are working, because the former are brought up in Bangladesh in a different religious and cultural environment. Moreover, a country exporting manpower will find it difficult to determine the required skill level of individuals. Secondly, it is difficult to impart specific contextual skills to individuals in a country from where skilled workers are always migrating. However, some common skills can be imparted regardless of the country of destination.
With the support of donor agencies, the government of Bangladesh wants to modernise or tune its polytechnic institutes so that they can help support the export of manpower. However, less than 4.0 per cent travel to progressively developing countries as technical hands. Thus, a 'tuned' polytechnic institute may produce semi-skilled workers who can migrate to other countries for a better future.
But what this scribe has noticed is that most of the polytechnic graduates working in Malaysia have saved some funds and are trying to settle there as their second home while polytechnic graduates employed in Middle-East are trying to migrate to other countries.
The highly skilled graduates from any university are migrating not only with their skills but also with the cash they gather by selling their properties in Bangladesh. They do not remit their earnings from the destination country to their country of origin. It is only the low-skilled and unskilled workers who remit their money home. However, this also needs a further critical understanding.
Remittances from the expatriates may slightly benefit the country of origin by pushing up their foreign currency reserve in the short term. But the workers may not necessarily be always benefited. The reasons are: (1) although apparently it looks rosy, the migrating workers contribute to the foreign currency buildup at a high cost of their travel which is not transacted through banks. This does not provide a scope to calculate the loss and gain of a worker, (2) after the end of an overseas contract, the workers find their skills useless and irrelevant because of contextual differences between the two countries, (3) nations exporting manpower may also import at a higher cost the goods that their migrated workers produce in the country of destination, and last but not least, (4) human beings are not goods to be exported. They leave for their destinations of dream with families back home and they are made to work abroad beyond normal working hours in inhuman conditions. Therefore, exporting goods produced by skilled manpower is profitable but exporting manpower is unacceptable.
Apart from the above shortcomings, Bangladesh may not be able to institutionalise its manpower export business. A worker has said: "This officer at Bangladesh High Commission supposed to be posted in Penang, stays in KL for her comfort. She is forcing us to travel to KL from different parts of Malaysia to get even a petty piece of work done. Sadly, this officer who earns more than RM 25000 as her salary and official perks in a month (by sitting in an air-conditioned office) is asking for bribe from me who only earns RM 800 standing in the hot sun!" What a raw deal these people are getting despite their efforts to keep the wheel of our economy in motion! The administration needs to look into it.
Dr. Gazi Mahabubul Alam is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Malaya, Malaysia.
gazi.alam@um.edu.my
Manpower export: Doing the equation
Gazi Mahabubul Alam | Published: December 27, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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