Potential emigration of scientists from a small EU country

Milena Bevc, Institute for Economic Research, Ljubljana
Sonja Ursic, Institute for Economic Research, Ljubljana

Emigration – especially of the most educated persons – is in most countries a very poorly registered phenomenon. The paper presents the methodology and the results of the analysis of potential emigration of researchers with master's or doctor's degrees from Slovenia in year 2005 compared to the mid 90s on the basis of the survey of these researchers. The analysis for 2005 was done within a research project carried out for the Slovene Ministry of Science whereas the analysis for the mid 90s was carried out within an international project on brain drain of researchers in 10 Eastern and Central European countries. For many reasons (use of random sampling, large sample - 1434 of researchers or 29% of “population”, high response - 41% etc.) the results are of great importance for the state policy in the science sector in Slovenia. The main result for the mid of the current decade is that the potential external mobility of Slovene scientists is high, like in the mid 90s, and regarding the structure of this mobility/migration the potential brain loss (the percentage of the sure long-term emigrants among all potential emigrants and respondents) is also considerable.