Every simulated year, the origin country's net economic effect is remittances gained minus productive capacity lost minus lost return on public education investment:
net = remittances
− lost_output(skill)
− lost_edu_ROI(skill)
- Low-skilled generalist — often under- or unemployed at home, so the domestic output they forgo is small and public training cost is near zero. Remittances dominate → usually net positive.
- High-skilled specialist (doctor) — the origin country paid heavily to train them and their labor served a scarce, hard-to-replace domestic role (e.g. rural healthcare). Both the lost output and lost education ROI scale up with scarcity, so even larger remittances often can't offset them → frequently net negative.
Toggle the skill selector at the same remittance slider value and watch the coin stream into the origin country look identical while the red bars — lost output and lost education investment — tell the opposite economic story.