ILO official warns of brain drain

Nearly half of our university graduates will emigrate. This is according to figures presented by International Labour Organisation (ILO) senior economist Dr Ajit Ghose at a public lecture on “Jobs and Incomes in a Globalising World” at the Central Bank Auditorium last Thursday. He discussed how the liberalised global flow of goods, services and labour, had affected the well-being of individual countries, developed and developing, in their levels of industrialisation, GDP, wages, employment, and migration.

Addressing fears, he began by explaining that contrart to the common belief, globalisation was not an inevitable process. “Globalisation can be reversed. Use globalisation to get benefits for our countries. Don’t think of it as a force we cannot control.” He posed several questions about the potential threat of globalisation to both developing and developed countries. Among other issues, he pondered whether globalisation has increased global income inequity (poverty), had unfavourable effects on unemployment and wages, showed bias in its trade rules against developing countries, curtailed the policy-making autonomy of States, and damaged health and the environment. Dr Ghose said developing countries had fared differently under globalisation.

Some developing countries had successfully competed with industrialised countries in exporting manufactured goods. While some in East Asia like Malaysia had used their increase in manufacturing exports to boost their GDP and become members of a 37-strong “convergence club” of higher-GDP growth countries, others in Latin America like Brazil and Mexico had been unable to translate increased exports into a higher GDP, most likely because they were hindered by initial debt burdens. While poverty had been halved in East Asia from 1990 to 2000, it had stayed the same in Latin America and had worsened in Sub Saharan Africa.