Professor of Human and Community Development at the University of California, Davis and a senior project director at the Berkeley Roundtable on the International Economy at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is an Editor of a book series on Innovation in the Global Economy at Stanford University Press and an Associate Editor at Research Policy. He is the author of over 120 scholarly articles.
Silicon Valley, Asia, and Returnees: How Important and When?
Recently much has been written about the role of returnees in the economic development of various East Asian nations. The early literature on the relocation of the most highly trained individuals from a developing nation to a developed nation, almost invariably the U.S. was criticized as contributing to a brain drain. More recently, a new strand of thinking has suggested that for developing nations this really was a positive phenomenon as these individuals would learn technology and, since much of the literature is drawn from the experience of immigrants to Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship. These individuals would then return to home nation bringing these skills with them and by putting them into practice would ignite a virtuous circle of technological entrepreneurship that would bring about economic development. This paper examines this argument critically by examining the take-off period and key entrepreneurs in the case of the three most important East Asian entrepreneurial miracles – Taiwan, China and India. The question posed is, was the take-off driven by returnees. And, if not, did the returnees only return after the economy began developing. If so, the deus ex machina near-mythic claims about returnees will have to be more nuanced.
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