UNU-WIDER Seminar: Presented by Professor Martin Kenney at UNU-WIDER

Seminar: Returnees, Asia, and Silicon Valley:  How Important? Why? and When?

Presented by: Professor Martin Kenney, Department of Human and Community Development, University of California, Davis. 

Abstract:

Recently much has been written about the role of returnees in the economic development of various East Asian nations. The early literature on the relocation of the most highly trained individuals from a developing nation to a developed nation, almost invariably the US, criticized the phenomena as 'brain drain'. More recently, a new strand of thinking has suggested that for developing nations this was a positive phenomenon, as these expatriates studied and then worked abroad in entrepreneurial high tech hubs such as Silicon Valley they absorbed not only technical expertise, but also managerial and entrepreneurial skills. These expatriates then returned home, so the argument goes, to ignite a virtuous circle of technological entrepreneurship leading to rapid economic development. Consequently, much of this literature gives the returnees a critical role in the home country's take-off period, the formation of the local information and communications technology (ICT) industry, and providing the key entrepreneurs. This interpretative essay examines the plausibility of these attributions for three of the most prominent East Asian entrepreneurial success stories – Taiwan, China and India. From the economic development perspective the key question is whether the returnees were critical for the take-off period, or whether they played an important part only in later, expansionary phase of the industry. We also check whether linkages specifically to Silicon Valley were indeed more important, and elaborate on the growing literature  exploring the rule of returnees in the globalization of ICT entrepreneurship.