Global migration studies and policy debates have long had this conversation:

• is it good or bad for a country to send its best and brightest abroad (maybe they return with skills and improve the country; maybe they earn outsized incomes and send them back home)
• is it good or bad for a country to receive the best and brightest from elsewhere... and if yes, how can you tell?
• do you have a moral obligation to take others? does it enrich your society?

The Economist heads to Kerala, India, to find that 1.7m of the state's inhabitants (5% of population, 11% of workforce) live and work in the Gulf -- as cleaners and construction workers, nurses, salespeople etc.

Gulf oil money has transformed Kerala. K.P. Kannan and K.S. Hari of the Centre for Development Studies, an Indian think-tank, calculate that by the mid-2010s remittances from the region were equivalent to about a quarter of the state’s output, and more than both its value added in manufacturing and its public spending. This has lifted living standards. Consumption per person is nearly three-quarters above the Indian average

If that remittance money is pure consumption rather than productive investment, good for the peeps but no future

Much of Kerala’s remittance windfall is spent on building houses and buying cars, which raises living standards but not productivity. Paying for children’s education, which Gulf money also bankrolls, does make Keralites more productive. So long as local opportunities to harness that productivity remain scarce, however, the brightest graduates will continue to try their luck abroad.

Maybe that's the best an aspirational, developing country can do?

Some economists argue that growing rich by industrialising and exporting industry’s products is harder nowadays than when Europe, Japan, South Korea and, most recently, China pulled it off. For countries like India, seizing a greater export market for manufactured wares in a world already awash with them requires shoving someone else out of the way. When that someone else is China, good luck with that.

"Could exporting people rather than goods, as Kerala does, provide an alternative path to prosperity?""Could exporting people rather than goods, as Kerala does, provide an alternative path to prosperity?"

The World Bank estimates that remittances [emigrants] send back home account for over a fifth of national income in Honduras, Lebanon, Nepal and Tajikistan. In low- and middle-income countries as a whole, they make up a third of all capital inflows

Another paper showed no relationship between a diaspora and growth in GDP/cap:

Emigration can, after all, be both the result of weak growth, which pushes people to leave in the first place, and the cause of economic acceleration. [...] Everything depends on the nature of emigration’s spillover effects. These can be positive if they raise average human capital in the sending country and this is harnessed domestically. They can also perpetuate the very problems that lead people to leave.

Emigration nearly always benefits emigrants and their families back home. Banking on it for broader growth amid rising fragmentation, protectionism and conflict is perilous

"Perhaps the biggest drawback of emigration-led growth is that its success rests on factors beyond the sending country’s control.""Perhaps the biggest drawback of emigration-led growth is that its success rests on factors beyond the sending country’s control."

tl;dr: sometimes. Maybe. In some cases.

archive: https://archive.md/HRca4