Economic Boom, Baby Bust · Part 5 of 6
The statistics see only the tip of the iceberg: the money emigrants send home. What skilled emigrants take with them stays below the surface.
A six-part series on why, in a growing economy, young Georgians wait to marry and have children. About the series
Previously, in Part 4: two in three young adults would leave for a while, and EU work permits for Georgians rose fourteen times after visa-free travel began. Read Part 4
Main findings
The usual calm argument about emigration goes like this: the people who leave send money home, unemployment goes down, and many come back. Each claim is roughly true for emigration as a whole. Together, however, they hide a narrower and costlier loss: brain drain, the departure of people whose skills the country paid to build and still needs.
Money sent home by workers abroad, % of GDP, 2024.
For every 100 lari of GDP, almost 12 lari arrive from people working abroad. That money pays for groceries, school fees and houses, and it is recorded as income. Unemployment looks better too: when a jobless 26-year-old moves to Spain, the statistics register one less unemployed person, and nothing else.
Not every emigrant is part of the brain drain. Money comes home from everyone who works abroad, whatever their job, and for many families it is a lifeline. The cost that goes uncounted is largest when the person who leaves is a doctor, an engineer, a teacher or a programmer: someone whose work also benefits the people around them.
Think of a beekeeper next to an apple orchard. His bees also pollinate the orchard, and its owner gets a bigger harvest without paying anything. Economists call this a positive externality (James Meade, 1952). If the beekeeper moves abroad, the honey money he sends home is recorded. The orchard's lost harvest is recorded nowhere. Skilled people are like that beekeeper.
The statistics see only the tip above the water.
Brain drain works like an iceberg. Above the water is what the statistics can see: the money emigrants send home, and a lower unemployment rate. That part is real. Below the water is everything that leaves with them and is never recorded: the patients a doctor would have treated, the nurses and students she would have trained, what her colleagues would have learned, the taxes for schools and pensions, the voter and the volunteer, and the children she will raise abroad. Nobody pays for these benefits, so nobody counts them, and the loss may be larger than it looks.
Would leave Georgia for a while, % by education, 2024.
Georgia pays to educate its doctors, engineers and teachers, through public schools, state grants and families' savings. When they leave, another country gets a professional it did not have to train.
To be fair: migration is not only loss. Emigrants learn skills, languages and business contacts, and some bring them home. Economists call this brain circulation, and it can bring real gains. The question for Georgia is whether coming back looks like a good bet.
Next · Part 6 of 6