Brain drain: Investigation of factors affecting country selection

Brain drain is a phenomenon that can directly impact both source and destination countries' development. In this research, factors that influence people who are subject to brain drain to make a decision on which country they choose to migrate is investigated. Australia, Italy and Turkey are picked as source countries for this analysis in order to present different geographic regions and level of depelopment. Brain drain data that was published with the joint work of LinkedIn and World Bank was used as dependent variable in this research. Analysis includes economic indicators such as Gross Domestic Product per capita, Business Confidence Index, inflation and unemployement rate; social indicators such as Human Development Index, Social Progress Index, Global Peace Index, Rule of Law; technological indicators such as Global Innovation Index; and finally the distance between source and destination countries as explanatory variables. Due to data is formed as panel data, Fixed Effect and Random Effect Model as methods of panel data regression are performed with R. Results suggest that indicators that may cause brain drain from one country to another seem to differ in different geographical regions and level of development.