BRAIN DRAIN – BRAIN GAIN: Poland 33 4 POLAND: LARGE MIGRATION OUTFLOWS AND SKILL-MISMATCH Paweł Kaczmarczyk, Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw INTRODUCTION For centuries now Poland has been a country of emigration. But even in comparison with previous massive waves of migration, often involving hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens, the year 2004 and accession to the European Union represents a turning point in Polish mobility trends. As an outcome of both push and pull factors the scale and dynam­ics of international migration from Poland have increased immensely – in fact, in the context of central and eastern Europe, the scale of migration from Poland is comparable only with the migration propensity of Romanians. In 2007 (peak year) the stock of Polish citizens living abroad tempo­rarily was estimated at around 2.3 million(6.6 per cent of the total population) and has remained at a relatively high level despite the Europe-wide economic crisis. Migration is selective. Traditionally, the mobility of persons well-endowed with human capital has played an important role in Polish migration. Similarly, the selective nature of post-accession migration, described above, manifests itself above all in the overrepresentation of highly educated people, often lacking previous experience in the Polish labour market, which to a large extent reflects structural mismatches on the Polish labour market. The second half of the twentieth century saw an increase in an attention paid to the migration of skilled persons. Initially, the term»brain drain« was used with reference to the mobility of British engineers and scientists to the United States, which in the opinion of British researchers reached alarming proportions at the end of the 1950s. Soon, how­ever, this term came to describe the emigration of highly skilled migrants from less developed countries, too. This process was seen as extremely negative, undermining the economic prospects of developing countries and contributing to their continued imprisonment in poverty. In the 1970s, when studies of brain drain flowered, this term started to be used as a general description of the migration of people with a higher education(Bhagwati and Hamada 1974). This approach, however, was questioned in the last decades of the twentieth century as new approaches took a more positive stance towards the outflow of people well-endowed with human capital. Against this background, one aim of the present report is to address the issue of the international mobility of well-edu­cated Poles, specifically to assess possible explanatory factors and to look at the risks and challenges related to highly skilled migration from the perspective of the sending country. The structure of the chapter is as follows. Section 1 summarises theoretical and empirical perspectives on highly skilled mobility(brain drain/brain gain debate). Section 2 looks at migration from Poland in the post-accession period with an emphasis on the mobility of well-educated people. Section 3 attempts to assess the underlying factors and possi­ble consequences of observed migratory streams. 4.1 THEORETICAL AND EMPIRICAL BACKGROUND Before going into detail we need, first, to define the term »highly skilled«(or»well educated«) as used in this report and, second, to comment on recent theoretical discussions of the issue. With regard to definition, the common practice is to identify skilled individuals with highly educated workers. This is mainly because it is very hard to gather reliable infor­mation on»on-the-job« experience or training; moreover, it is extremely tricky to assess the unobservable factors responsi­ble for migration or labour market performance(for example, innate ability). As a consequence, most practical approaches are similar to the one proposed by the OECD(2002), whose definition of highly skilled workers includes workers that have completed tertiary education and workers that did not complete tertiary education but are employed in occupations in which such a qualification is usually required. For pragmatic reasons, in this report we will refer to the first part of this definition of skilled workers based on years of formal educa­tion, particularly because it is consistent with the approach to this issue taken in Poland, where highly skilled persons are defined as university graduates who has also acquired at least an MA(5–6 level in the ISCED classification). The second controversy in recent debates on the mobility of the highly skilled concerns the notion of»brain drain« and its theoretical repercussions. The mobility of highly educated people potentially generates effects that surface