Monday, May 15, 2006

Italy Brain Drain Controversy Heats Up

The ANNOTICO Report

One of the Answers to Italy's problem of Low Income Third World Competition, is to move out of Production and into Providing High Technology Products and Services by Research,and that is being Jeopardized by the continuing Brain Drain in Italy.

 

ITALY: BRAIN DRAIN CONTROVERSY HEATS UP

AKI

Rome

May 12, 2006

 

 

  Italy's outgoing government has denied a report published this week claiming it has frozen a key plan aimed at attracting back to Italy leading scientists and researchers who were forced to leave the country for lack of funding. The report, published in Rome-daily La Republica, said the ministry for education and research had blocked funding in the 2006 Budget, compromising a project kickstarted in 2001 which had brough back to Italy 466 researchers.

Brain drain is a huge problem in a country which exports every year 30 thousand researchers and imports only three thousand.

The programme inaugurated in 2001 by a previous centre-left government contributed to attracting 466 researchers in five years - half of them Italian and the other half foreign, mainly US, British and French citizens.

In a statement, however, outgoing education and research minister Letizia Moratti said the ministry had allocated three million euros directly to universities to ! enable them to provide grants to 300 researchers who had benefited from the measure so they could remain permanently.

The problem of brain drain is a recurrent theme in news reports here.

European countries on average invest 1,6 percent of their GDP in research while Italy only invests 0,8 percent.

The phenomenon is quite unique in Italy as other large economies in the European Union experience a 'brain exchange', according to a study by economist Andrea Ichino of the European University Institute.

Indeed in the late 1990s up to five percent of new college graduates emigrated abroad, where research opportunities are much greater and university careers are based more on meritocracy and less on nepotism.

This has led Italy to have a very low ratio of researchers per students in universities, 2,8 percent, compared to the EU average of 5,4 and the US average of 8,1.

 

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