Diaspora and Development
Tue, 03 Mar 2015 14:49:00 GMT
The Business School’s Emerging Markets Research Group (EMERGE) heard Professor Vudayagi Balasubramanyam (Baloo) from Lancaster University Management School present his research on Indian diaspora and development through technology transfer.
Baloo is Emeritus Professor of Development Economics at Lancaster University. Throughout his rich academic career he has developed expertise and published across a number of areas, ranging from FDI and policies to human capital. His most recent research is in the area of human capital – mainly that of India – but through spill over effects also countries providing home to Indian diaspora.
In his presentation, Baloo outlined trends in immigration globally and in the context of the UK. In the case of the latter, the percentage of foreign born nationals increased from about 4 per cent to 12 per cent between 1951 and 2011. Worldwide the percentage of migrants increased by 50 per cent between 1990 and 2013. However the global population increased nearly as quickly and so the percentage of migrants rose only from 2.9 per cent to 3.2 per cent. 10 countries lost more than 20 per cent of their population via emigration during this period. These were headed by Jamaica which lost 39 per cent of its population.
Baloo’s talk then focused on the Indian diaspora of which he is a member. Between 1999 and 2008, the UK was the preferred destination of Indian migrants with 48, 000 settling in the country. Indians now represent 2.5% of the UK’s population.
Remittances from the Indian diaspora have increased much more rapidly than FDI and Foreign aid. India, for example, received more than $70billion by way of remittances in 2012-13. However Baloo’s main thesis was that transfer of technology and know-how by the diaspora has a much stronger impact on growth and development than do remittances. However he also developed a model which aimed to demonstrate that the impact on trade of the UK from the diaspora from the Commonwealth may be much more significant than that from the EU. Finally he attempted to demonstrate that emigration of unskilled labour may not have an impact on the home country; in fact, it may have adverse effects. Indeed exports of labour intensive goods may be a much better option than exports of unskilled labour.
Professor John Anchor, Director of the Emerging Markets Research Group, says “it was a great privilege to have Baloo in Huddersfield and to hear what he had to say about both trends in and theories of migration. The topic has become one of the key issues of discourse in the context of globalisation. It is also one which is increasingly politically charged. In the UK this manifests itself in the context of a wider debate about Britain’s place in the world – both in relation to the European Union and the Commonwealth”.
