Final Project Part 3 Literature Review
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LITERATURE REVIEW OF BRAIN DRAIN IN ROMANIA 1
Literature Review of Brain Drain in Romania
Steven L. Johndrow
College of Arts and Sciences, Liberty University
Author Note
I have no conflict of interest to disclose.
Correspondence concerning the article should be addressed to Steven L. Johndrow
Email: sljohndrow@liberty.edu
LITERATURE REVIEW OF BRAIN DRAIN IN ROMANIA 2
Abstract
This review looks at literature relating to the brain drain phenomenon within Romania. Romania has had significant population decline since it opened up following the fall of the communist government in 1989. Emigration has been a significant part of this decline with the highest skilled making up a majority. This review will look at literature on why these workers choose to migrate. Literature related to why migrants choose their destination is also looked at. Other research looked at is potential solutions and the return migration to Romania.
LITERATURE REVIEW OF BRAIN DRAIN IN ROMANIA 3
Introduction
For this literature review I will be examining the literature associated with emigration from Romania. Particularly I will be looking at the effect of brain drain on Romania. Brain drain is the phenomenon associated with the emigration of the most highly trained and educated emigrating from a country. Generally, the reasons for this are due to better opportunities elsewhere. This could be associated with higher pay, better working conditions, and better living conditions among other reasons. Since the fall of the Communist government in 1989, Romania has had a declining population and an overall loss of their most highly skilled and educated citizens. Background
Historical Information
The modern state of Romania is the result of a unification of two principalities: Wallachia
and Moldavia. This unification took place following the emancipation of these areas from the Ottoman empire. The modern state of Romania was founded in 1859. Romania appointed King Carol I as their first monarch in 1881 after being fully acknowledged as being independent. Romania existed as a monarchy until 1947 when King Michael I was forced to abdicate his
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throne. Following this, Romania came under control of the Romanian Communist Party, and was
occupied by the Soviet Union. In 1965 the country came under control of Nicolae Ceausescu. Under Ceausescu, Romania never became part of the Soviet Union, operating as a satellite state while still maintaining autonomy. During Ceausescu’s time in power, Romania’s birth rate skyrocketed due to strict abortion and contraception laws put in place to increase the population within Romania. During Ceausescu’s time, he drove Romania heavily into debt, and in the 1980s
attempted to pay off all of Romania’s foreign debt leaving Romania in a dire financial situation. During this time the infrastructure and industry within Romania suffered, people starved, and on December 25, 1989, his government was overthrown, and Ceausescu and his wife were executed. Following the fall of the Communist regime, Romania has worked to switch over to a capitalistic society. In the early years following the fall of the Communist Party the country struggled with former communist leaders attempting to run the country. Romania even still today
struggles with a large amount of corruption within their government. With all this, Romania has aligned themselves largely with the west. In 2004, Romania joined NATO, a political and military alliance among many European and North American countries. In 2007 Romania joined the European Union aligning them economically with the majority of European countries. During this time Romania has made significant economic growths but has struggled with significant population decline. Demographic Information
Romania as of 2021 had a population of 19.1 million per the World Bank. This is a loss of over four million people since 1990 when Romania had a population of 23.2 million. Of this population, over 80% is ethnically Romanian. Other ethnic groups represented in Romania, are
LITERATURE REVIEW OF BRAIN DRAIN IN ROMANIA 5
Hungarian at 6.1%, Romani at 3.1%, Ukrainian at 0.3% and German at 0.2%. It is important to point out that Romani are often underrepresented in this data as they tend to stay within their own ethnic group. Romania has a negative population growth rate of -1.09% with one of the world lowest birth rates of 8.76 births/1,000 population and one of the highest death rates of 15.26 deaths/1,000 population. Additionally, Romania has a net migration rate of -4.36/1,000 population. Roughly 46% of the Romanian population lives in rural areas, with these areas having lower levels of education, where only 6.52% have education beyond high school level.
Environmental Information
Romania is located in South-East Europe, at the crossroads between Eastern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula. Major cities located within Romania are the capital city Bucharest, Constanta, Cluj-Napoca, Craiova, Timisoara, and Iasi. Romania shares boarders with Ukraine, Moldova, Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria. The Danube River makes up most of the southern border, leading to the Danube River Delta and ultimately ending in the Black Sea. Central Romanian landscape is dominated by the Carpathian Mountain range. The outer areas of the country is mostly made up of rolling hills, and land primarily used for agriculture. Romania has a
temperate continental climate with four distinct seasons. Romania has suffered from significant air and water pollution. The primary source of this is from factories and poor farming practices. Literature Review
Research on the influence of brain drain can be traced back to the 1960s. Most of the early research points to the idea that there was limited impact on the sending countries. This was primarily due to resources left behind, and generally free migration was look upon favorably. Since the 1960s, the foreign-born population among high income countries has tripled (Docquier & Rapoport, 2012). Research has found that the number of skilled workers in Organization for
LITERATURE REVIEW OF BRAIN DRAIN IN ROMANIA 6
Economic Co-operation and Development countries rose 64% between 1990 and 2000. The data does appear deceiving though, because the emigration rates of the individuals slightly declined during this period. (Docquier, Lohest, & Marfouk, 2007) explains this phenomenon is due to the increase in higher educational attainment during this period. There are many reasons why this can take place. In a study completed by Luiza Ionescu, she looks at the reasons for emigration from six Eastern European countries too include Romania, using data from 1980-2010. Ionescu’s research found that migration is one of the primary contributors to Romania’s significant population decline, with significant loss between 1992 and 2012. As of writing this paper, Ionescu states that over 2 million Romanians are residents in other European Union Countries, most of which migrated to Italy and Spain. This made Romania the country with most citizens living outside the home country (Ionescu, 2015). The most affected industries due to migration from Romania were medical and IT fields. Ionescu’s research also found that as the country transitioned to a market based economy in the early 1990s that there were high unemployment rates throughout the country leading to increased
migration. This argument was also stated, by (Mrak, 2000), in which the author also describes the high unemployment rates of Central and Eastern European countries, as they transitioned from planned systems to open market systems. This research finds that the rates of employment had not increased over the years as expected, and attributed the phenomenon to labor shedding (Mrak, 2000).
Research presents the concepts of brain drain as not exclusive to Romania, researchers, Stubbotin and Aref look at brain drain, and brain gain in Russia. Their research looked the migration of researchers to and from Russia. To do this they looked at research articles for these academic migrants from their source country and their destination country. The research found
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that overall Russia suffered from a negative migration rate compared academic migrating to Russia (Subbotin & Aref, 2021). In their article they do acknowledge the limitations of their research due to the nature of the bibliometric data being used. They acknowledge name misidentification and underrepresentation in the Scopus database as reasons for these limitations.
The research also did find that in more recent years the immigration vs emigration rate between Russia and other countries was becoming closer to equal. In (Goga and Ilie, 2017), “From “brain drain” to brain gain”. Where does Romania stand,” the authors attempt to determine the reasons for brain drain and how they feel Romania is
doing in respect to drain vs gain. In doing this they interview 250 residents of Craiova, Romania,
to determine their belief on why brain drain happens and its effects on the area. The research showed that similar to what has been discussed before limited employment opportunities are a primary factor. Other reasons are due to low wages, substandard healthcare infrastructure, and unorthodox health care practices. The research also points to two primary negative effects to Romania first being, Romanian society being deprived of its most highly skilled professionals. The second reason found was the loss in investment that Romania made in educated these individuals (Goga & Ilie, 2017). The research also found that of the highly qualified individuals that do go to Romania, most come from developing countries. (Balan & Olteanu, 2017) look at how globalization has affected Romanian brain drain. Their work looks at trends, volume, and structure of these highly skill migrants and the impacts created by them. As Romania opened up to the world following 1989, there was a significant out flow of Romanians mostly looking for work opportunities. This stayed relatively stable through 2006 but when Romania joined the EU in 2007, joining a more global society, emigration increased significantly (Balan & Olteanu, 2017). The reasons for this concurs with most of the
LITERATURE REVIEW OF BRAIN DRAIN IN ROMANIA 8
research that has be conducted. The authors found that the outflow of these migrants from developing countries such as Romania can be detrimental due to the limited inflow highly skilled
migrants from other countries. Also concurring with (Goga & Ilie, 2017) the work finds that loss of investment from the origin country creates significant impact. Their work while limited does reference benefits of this to include outside money being sent back to countries of origin from many of these highly skilled migrant workers. In the article published by (Botezat & Mararu, 2020), the examine medical diaspora within Romania. Works they cite reference similar views on the effects of investment but even the worker staying for a few years after schooling would help return on investment and sending remittances back to the country of origin would help as well. They present a counter argument that many highly skilled workers mover permanently leading to less remittance. The article also references the impact that medical diaspora has on the healthcare systems in the sending countries, citing negative impacts on child and adult mortality rates. (Botezat & Moraru, 2020) find that around 80% of Romanian medical students express a willingness to migrate following graduation, signaling potential future problems. The work finds that there are struggles for Doctors migrating to include difficulty understanding the host countries healthcare systems, language barriers, and difficulties socializing with local residents. The degree to which these difficulties matter vary by country. The work also found the Doctors that specialize emigrate from Romania at a higher rate than General Practitioners. (Botezat & Ramos, 2020) Acknowledge that very little research has been conducted on why these highly skilled individuals migrate to where they chose. The research that is available points to physicians choosing locations with more economic freedom, lower share of public health expenditures, and higher per capita spending. (Botezat & Ramos, 2020) also determined that destination countries
LITERATURE REVIEW OF BRAIN DRAIN IN ROMANIA 9
for physicians typically had lower unemployment rates. Other reasons cited are colonial and linguistic ties to the receiving country (Gavriloaia, 2021). There was also determined to be disparity on where many of the highly skilled individuals within Romania migrate from. The highest skilled individuals tend to migrate from western counties and Bucharest, while southern and eastern Romania consists of more low skilled manual laborers (Mitrica et al. 2022). One consideration of increased out-flow of migrants from urban areas could be related to the economic crisis from 2008-2011 and urban areas tended to struggle more during this time period.
They also recovered slower compared to the rural area nearby the larger cities (Pavel et al. 2020).
Rural areas of Romania, tend to struggle with attaining higher levels of education. Most of the employment in these areas is related to agriculture or other forms of manual labor. Only 6.52% of individuals from rural areas receive higher levels of education and around 80% do not have a high school level of education (Popescu, Dinu, & Stoian, 2018).
To coincide with why these individuals migrate (Gavriloaia, 2021) discusses potential solutions too the problem. These solutions pertain to both maintaining highly skilled individuals and convincing others to return. The first idea presented is to focus on government spending on research and development, along with increased spending in higher education. Also provided is identifying the sectors with the greatest need and working with local schools to facilitate education within these fields. The idea of enticing skilled workers from other developing countries to Romania with green card work programs for these highly skilled workers. This would be similar to programs seen within Germany and the United States. There is competing literature with many of these articles written to discuss the outpouring
of highly skilled workers. (Ambrosini et al. 2011) describes positives associated with the brain drain phenomenon. Their work cites large bodies of work that state that often this migration is a
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temporary instance and that these workers bring back skills learned abroad. Benefits include the positive effects on schooling in their home country, and international contacts abroad funneling knowledge into these highly skilled workers home countries (Mayr & Peri, 2009).
Conclusion
In reviewing the literature available on brain drain, particularly in respect to Romania, the
motivations behind these highly skilled researchers is well documented. The research available points to low wages and employment opportunities within Romania, and higher pay with better life style abroad. This theme appears standard among all developing countries suffering from this
phenomenon. The negative effects on the country of origin appear well researched as well. There
do appear to be gaps in research, with limited focus put on potential solutions to the problem. The idea of benefits and return migration was also presented in this review but the research on this appears limited as well. There needs to be more focused research on the motivations for highly skilled workers to return to their home country along with the benefits provided from the brain drain, brain return phenomenon.
LITERATURE REVIEW OF BRAIN DRAIN IN ROMANIA 11
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