Uluslararası öğrenci göçü ve menşe ülkelerin özgürlük düzeyleri

The commonly preferred destination countries by international students are considered among the most democratic countries in the world. We explore whether and how deteriorating freedom level in origin countries affects the behavior of pursuing higher education abroad. Particularly, we focus on student migration from three countries where the freedom level has deteriorated in the 2010s according to the democracy index of the Freedom House: Hungary, Venezuela, and Indonesia. We employ data of the population of international students in the OECD countries for 2004-2016 period. To estimate the causal effect of deteriorating freedom level on the outmigration of students, we apply two different estimation techniques: Difference-in-Differences (DD) and the Synthetic Control Method (SCM). We find that deteriorating freedom in countries increases the outmigration of its young citizens in most instances where the applied research method provides an appropriate comparison unit. Particularly, DD estimates show a statistically significant increase in the population of students pursuing higher education abroad for Venezuela, and SCM estimates show a statistically significant increase for Hungary.