Determinants of health professionals’ migration in Africa: a WHO based assessment
Abstract
Purpose
How do economic prosperity, health expenditure, savings, price-stability, demographic change, democracy, corruption control, press freedom, government effectiveness, human development, foreign aid, physical security, trade openness and financial liberalization play-out in the fight against health-worker crisis when existing emigration levels matter? Despite the acute concern of health-worker crisis in Africa owing to emigration, lack of relevant data has made the subject matter empirically void over the last decades. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
A quantile regression approach is used to assess the determinants of health-worker emigration throughout the conditional distributions of health-worker emigration. This provides an assessment of the determinants when existing emigrations levels matter.
Findings
Findings provide a broad range of tools for the fight against health-worker brain-drain. As a policy implication, blanket emigration-control policies are unlikely to succeed equally across countries with different levels of emigration. Thus to be effective, immigration policies should be contingent on the prevailing levels of the crisis and tailored differently across countries with the best and worst records on fighting health-worker emigration.
Originality/value
This paper has examined the theoretical postulations of a World Health Organization report on determinants of health-worker migration.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
JEL Classification—D60, F22, I10, J24, O15
The author is highly indebted to the editor and referees for their constructive comments.
Citation
Simplice, A. (2015), "Determinants of health professionals’ migration in Africa: a WHO based assessment", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 42 No. 7, pp. 666-686. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSE-12-2013-0287
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2015, Emerald Group Publishing Limited