Brain gain

Bumped into these 2 Chinese students who'd attended the annual Conference of the Chinese Economic Association in Den Haag. Both are students in Europe, the 1 in Dublin/Ireland and the other in Bath/UK.

Asking them if I could blip them they posed apart like this and did not come closer to one another what the Dutch would do, let alone European students ~ it's no more than a detail that informs about their background.

just looked up on Internet what the issue of their conference was and wonder what they will contribute to this in the near future.

The invitation to theme earlier this year publised read:
China’s economic development led to imbalances in the economy which ask for adjustment of long term structures rather than a quick change in economic policy.
The fact that some of the imbalances have been acknowledged in the 12th Five Years Plan is however no substitute for a thorough examination of those factors which might impede sustainable development in the future. Within the overall theme of the conference we particularly invite papers that investigate one or more of the challenges to China’s economy and continued economic growth:
• Middle income trap
• Low domestic consumption
• High savings rate
• Unequal income distribution
• Lack of independence of the financial sector
• Unsustainable use of natural resources (energy, water, land)
• Dominance of manufacturing and export-processing
• Dependence on low and medium-level technology
• Ill-functioning markets
• Lack of transparency of fiscal and budgetary systems
• Strongly decentralized administration
• Ageing and upgrading of a shrinking workforce
• Brain drain and brain gain
• Unemployment of the highly educated
Some of these areas remain under-researched, while others lack a solid micro-economic base for research. Many of these challenges are beyond the scope of ‘pure’ economic reasoning and require research that includes institutional analysis, political economy, or a firm-perspective. We therefore in particular invite applied micro-economic research which aims at modelling and testing the behaviour of firms, families or social groups.