
It can be awfully difficult to turn down a job offer from a powerful donor
Over at the Roving Bandit, the Skeptical Bandit asks an important question: we’ve spent a lot of time arguing over the net effect of ‘the brain drain,’ the migration of skilled labour from poor to rich countries, but we spend very little time worrying about the internal brain drain – the movement of skilled labour from the public and private sectors to development agencies and NGOs.
Donors and NGOs typically have a mandate to hire local staff (we would be worried if they didn’t). Since foreign agencies have the desire to get the best and the brightest to work for them have a higher ability (and perhaps willingness) to pay, there is a small, but perceivable migration of talent from local governments to their development partners.
Anyone who’s spent time working for a developing government is familiar with the following scene: your department has a few extremely capable servants who spend a disproportionate amount of their time looking for jobs outside of government, at the expense of their work.
Efficient civil services rely on a key driver of effort: career concerns; you work hard because you want to climb the ladder. When the top of that ladder ends at the UN, not the government, ambitious civil servants will feel less motivated to excel (unless they are trying to impress a donor). Even when the few bright stars do bother to overachieve, they’re quickly snapped-up into the development sector.
This also reduces a government’s incentives to invest in the human capital of their own civil service. Why send your employees off for further education if it will increase the chance they’ll defect?
Donors and a charities, on a whole, don’t see a problem with this; they are typically smitten with the belief that the recipient government is incompetent or corrupt and so lose little sleep over recruiting local expertise. These beliefs aren’t entirely unjustified – NGOs and aid agencies often are much more efficient than local governments, but the practice of poaching talent reinforces this reality as the internal brain drain inevitably hinders government’s capacity. By contributing to a low-capacity ‘trap’ for governments, the development sector ensures its place in the world (even if this is not their intention).





