How Home Country’s Development Can Work against Its Best and Brightest: The Case of Korean Electronics Industry

In economic development, high-skilled migration has been at the forefront of scholarly discourse. Despite the interest, what is still missing in the discussion is the impact that home-country institutions play when foreign-educated elites return to home country. To fill this gap, we employ a case-study method to analyze the careers of South Korean engineering PhDs who studied at U.S. universities. The conventional wisdom in economic development literature is that a home-country’s development reaching a level to attract back overseas talent would count as an unequivocal success. However, what we found is that the benefit of job-creation by home-country institutions is uneven across the population, and may possibly have a surprisingly unintentional detrimental effect in the case of top talents. A concrete lesson here is that creating institutions that encourage the maximum knowledge output from the nation’s the best and the brightest is extremely difficult. This research aims to serve as a cautionary tale to the policymakers, academics and managers in the APEC region, as many nations are attempting to replicate Korea’s success in knowledge sectors.