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Serbia. Low wages, poor working conditions and lack of resources and infrastructure
besides the equivalence of diplomas were pointed out as the main reasons behind the
willingness to emigrate from Romania to EU. In Estonia, the accession of the country to
the EU in 2004 has led to a temporary migration peak of doctors and nurses to
neighboring EU countries. Similar problems are encountered by the health sector in
Latvia, as the initial shortage of medical staff has been exacerbated by the emigration of
medical doctors to other EU. Every year approximately 300–400 physicians leave their
jobs, while only 100 new physicians are hired, annually. France, Germany and the United
Kingdom appear to be the major destinations from ECE countries.
Migratory flows of doctors from the MENA are not a recent phenomenon. It had started
early in the 20th century and has fluctuated since then depending on the political and
economic conditions between MENA and the main destination countries such as the
United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Also, physicians’ migration patterns
have reflected, in general, the language and geographic proximity as well as the cultural
and historical ties between destination and origin countries. For instance, while Middle
Eastern and Egyptian physicians tend to concentrate their migration on the US and UK,
North African physicians are more attracted by Francophone countries.
In the case of MENA, the first difficulty underlining the study of medical brain drain is
the lack of official and clear statistics, especially on the side of the sending countries. The
statistics produced by destination countries remain the sole origin of information on the
topic, where the main source is the OECD (International Migration Outlook).
Overall, the MENA region is reported to have a high emigration rate. OECD statistics
(2000) indicate that Lebanon has a high physicians’ expatriation rate in the MENA
region, followed by Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. The countries of the Golf
(oil producing countries) generally display the lowest expatriation rates according to
OECD data. Using total physician emigration rate in a country as the ratio between the
stock of national physicians working abroad and the number of physicians trained in the
home country, and excluding the doctors trained in the host country, Docquier and
Bhargawa (2007) found that for 2009 Lebanon and Syria have the highest emigration rate
with respectively 19.6% and 17.5% followed by Jordan (9.9%), Algeria (7.1%), Morocco
(6.6%), and then Egypt (5.6%). Accounting for the physicians born in MENA but trained
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