Why brain drain? Malaysian experience

Abstract

Brain drain has been a long debated issue which became one of the focal points among re-searchers and practitioners. For last two decades, Malaysia has been facing the brain drain problem which has a serious negative effect on human capital of the country. The World Bank report shows that in 2011 sixty-four per cent of Malaysians migrated to other developed countries. These groups of people are highly educated and are engaged in top three major occupations such as physicians, engineers and lecturers. Therefore, it is ev-ident that the country is facing high risk in retaining highly skilled workers in the industry which indirectly may affect the economic sector of the country. However, there is a dearth of study pointing this issue. Consid-ering this, the present paper fills this gap by providing in-depth understanding of the phenomenon. More spe-cifically, this study attempts to explore the factors that affect skilled Malaysian citizens to migrate outside the country. This study utilized open-ended questionnaires through an online survey in order to acquire required data. The results show that there are five main reasons that drives brain drain in the Malaysian context. These factors are: gap in wages/income, better job opportunity, race-based policy, standard of living and family fac-tors. Gap in wages is found to be the most influential factor which weighs the heaviest in promoting Malaysi-an brain drain. The findings illustrate that the government must stimulate a higher income economy to assure that employees. income and wages are compatible with the cost of living in Malaysia. As to win and bring back the nation.s brain drained population, policy makers need to be aggressive in implementing rules and regulations for Malaysian emigrants who are permanently staying abroad.