#573 2019 · Global Skill Partnerships (Michael Clemens design; Belgium-Morocco PALIM pilot) · Labor migration / international development policy
A migration-training program stopped treating every graduate who emigrates as a loss, by training extra people who were never meant to stay
the problem
Training skilled workers in a poor country to fill a rich country's labor shortage drains exactly the skilled people the poor country's own economy needs
background
Skilled labor migration is normally framed as zero-sum: a destination country facing a shortage -- nurses, ICT workers, construction tradespeople -- wants trained migrants, but training those people in the origin country pulls exactly the skilled workers that economy needs most, the textbook 'brain drain' problem. Origin-country governments, wary of subsidizing an exodus of their own best-trained citizens, often resist or slow-walk skilled-emigration training schemes, even when a destination country is willing to help fund the training.
Economist Michael Clemens, in a 2015 World Bank policy proposal, argued the standard responses -- restrict emigration, or simply accept the drain as the cost of training subsidies from abroad -- both left real gains unclaimed. What was missing was a training design that didn't assume every graduate had to either stay or leave for the whole program to make sense.
what everyone would do
Either restrict or discourage the skilled training-then-emigration pipeline to protect the origin country's own workforce, or accept the training subsidy from the destination country and treat the resulting brain drain as an unavoidable cost of that funding -- the two standard positions in a debate usually framed as origin country versus destination country with no way for both to win.
what they saw
Clemens saw that the real problem wasn't training people who might emigrate, it was training only as many people as the destination country needed and calling all of them a loss to the origin country. If a program trained more people than the away track required, and split every cohort into an away group and a home group from the very first day, the origin country would end up with additional trained capacity as a direct byproduct of the very migration flow that used to look like pure extraction.
the move
Clemens proposed the 'Global Skill Partnership': a technical training program, jointly designed and part-funded by both an origin and a destination country, where every entering student chooses one of two tracks from day one. An 'away' track trains students specifically for the destination country's job openings, with that training financed by destination-country employers, governments, or migration-contingent loans; a 'home' track, using the same curriculum and instructors, trains students for jobs inside the origin country, cross-subsidized in part by the away-track financing. The origin country isn't losing trained workers to emigration it didn't plan for -- it's running a training program that exports a portion of its graduates by design, while the rest add skilled capacity at home.
why it works
Financing the away track from destination-country money (employers, governments, or migration-contingent loans) means the origin country pays little or nothing extra to train workers bound for emigration, while a portion of that same financing cross-subsidizes home-track training for people who never intended to leave. Because both tracks share curriculum, instructors and infrastructure, running the two together is cheaper than running separate programs for each purpose, and the origin country gains a set of newly skilled workers it wouldn't have trained at all without the destination country's willingness to fund the away track. The design converts what was previously read as a one-way extraction (the destination country taking trained workers) into a jointly funded expansion of training capacity that happens to export part of its output, which is why it can secure origin-government cooperation that a pure emigration-training scheme couldn't.
the payoff
The design was piloted as PALIM (Pilot Project Addressing Labour Shortages through Innovative Labour Migration) between Belgium's Flanders region and Morocco starting in 2019, training around 120 unemployed Moroccan college graduates in ICT and soft skills for shortage industries in both countries, run by Belgium's development agency Enabel with Morocco's national employment agency ANAPEC. As of mid-2020, only a small number of trainees had actually begun coordinating with a Belgian employer to relocate, with most of the cohort's near-term outcomes materializing in the Moroccan labor market instead -- a real but partial test of the away-track pipeline, still short of the scheme's full ambition.
where it breaks
The design depends on the away track's financing genuinely covering enough of the shared program cost to make the home-track subsidy real -- if destination-country funding is too thin or too narrowly earmarked, the cross-subsidy shrinks or disappears and the program reverts to looking like ordinary emigration training with extra steps. It also depends on the away track actually converting trainees into placements at a meaningful rate; the PALIM pilot's early results, where only a handful of the roughly 120 trained workers had begun relocating to Belgium within its first year, show the away track can underperform its design intent if employer engagement, visa processing, or job matching on the destination side lags behind the training pipeline itself.
what came after
A parallel Global Skill Partnership has trained Kosovar construction workers for the German labor market on the same two-track design, and the model continues to be studied and refined as a policy tool for reframing skilled migration as a jointly financed, jointly beneficial training investment rather than a one-directional loss for the origin country -- though early pilots like PALIM show the 'away' track converting trainees into actual emigration more slowly and in smaller numbers than the 'home' track, a real gap between the design's promise and its early execution.
references
- [1]Global Skill Partnerships: A Proposal for Turning Brain Drain into Brain GainWorld Bank / Center for Global Development (Michael A. Clemens), 2015documents1.worldbank.org
- [2]Why the Global Skills Partnership between Morocco and Belgium is a Positive-Sum GameSAIS Review of International Affairs, Johns Hopkins University, 2021saisreview.sais.jhu.edu