Innovation and International High Skilled Migration

The international mobility of highly skilled employees in the last few decades has become an essential part of an economy. Simultaneously innovation and its' components have a large effect on the migration of skilled people. The goal of this paper is finding out if a greater degree of innovation in a country has a positive impact on the arrival of highly skilled immigrants. In order to achieve the aforementioned goal and following existing literature on the subject, an analysis on an international level was made regarding the effect of relevant innovation factors (number of patents; research and development funding (as % of GDP) and number of articles in scientific and technical journals) on immigration of highly skilled employees. The results of a regression analysis confirmed a significant relation between the number of patents, articles in scientific and technical journals and number of highly skilled immigrants (HQI). This means that countries with a relatively larger amount of the innovation factors have a great incentive that attracts talented people on an international scale, although in order to achieve this there is the need to promote and maintain a favourable institutional, economic and technological environment.