Study On The Impact Of Transnational Human Capital Flow On The Quality Of Export Products

With the integration of global economy,factors flow frequently across international borders,and members of the international community compete each other with factors more than with goods.As a result,human capital(especially high-quality human capital)has be regarded as the core driving-force for international competition,and thus the target of resource race around the world.Recently,international student and international migration have received more and more attention as two specific forms of international human capital flows.International flows of human capital are not only the process of global re-allocation of intellectual resources,but also important carriers of international diffusion of technology.As to the home country,however,international flows of human capital have both the effects of intellectual inflow and intellectual outflow,the different roles of which have not been clarified in the literature.Basing on the advance of existing research,this dissertation examines the impact of international migration and international student on the quality of exporting product.The industry intensity on cognitive ability provides us a distinct perspective to identify the effect of international flows of human capital.This dissertation first explore theoretically the impacts of international student and migration on the quality of export products,in which the technological diffusion and human capital endowment are main specific channels.The conditions and thresholds are also discussed.This dissertation then constructs an industry-level intensity index on cognitive ability,and examines empirically with the difference-in differences(DID)regression the effects of two types of human capital outflow rate on the quality of export products.The product quality are calculated with the methodology developed by Khandelwal et al.(2013),and the trade data comes from the HS6 trade data of France CEPII database.Data about international human capital are obtained from OECD statistics about international out-flow student and international emigrants,whose destinations are 35 OECD countries.This dissertation confirms with the 2015 data that,international flows of human capital do impact the exporting quality of home countries,which are stronger in industries with higher intensity of cognitive ability.Specifically,international student is showed a net effect of "brain gain" to the home countries,which helps to improve the quality of export product,and international migration is showed a net "brain drain" to the home countries,which tends to weaken the quality of export product.As the latter outweighs the former,the net impact is to reduce the quality of export products.These conclusions hold with the sample of non-OECD countries instead of that of OECD countries.In addition,improving the quality of education is showed to be still an important way to improve the quality of export products.According to the dissertation,creating good working environment and providing stage for ambitions are conducive to both the returnees and the local talents,and thus to the upgrading of the quality of export product.The dissertation enriches the theoretical explanation of international flows of human capital,and provides both new perspective and new evidences about international flows of human capital.