Migration Economics: Remittances vs. Brain Drain

When a worker emigrates to a higher-income country, the origin country feels two opposing forces at once: a steady inflow of remittances that lifts household income, and a quiet loss of the worker's on-the-ground productive capacity and, for trained specialists, the return on the public money spent educating them. This simulation runs both effects forward year by year for the same remittance amount, comparing a low-skilled generalist against a high-skilled scarce specialist such as a doctor, to show why the identical dollar flow can leave one origin economy better off and the other worse off.