Economic Freedom In Action

A significant distinction between the three available stances on the flow of medical personnel is one of perception. Both the ‘informal’ (status quo) and our ‘formalised’ model are able to consider trained medics as a resource that a country has the option to export, and to maximise. We have said that the current system contains a reprehensible inconsistency: medical personnel are treated as resources, but at the same time are not fully paid for in a way that makes the exchange comparable to a mutually beneficial exploitation of comparative advantage. Our proposed model has the benefit of QUALIFYING the classification of medical personnel as resources, by the fact that they are fully paid for. Then, the migration of medics to richer countries becomes an argument we can make in fully economic terms. To train a medic in the ‘poorer’ countries costs empirically less. Hence they have what we would call a comparative advantage in the production of a precious resource: medical personnel. A ‘richer’ country who seeks the use of such a resource does so at the best price available for maximum efficiency. In every other case where it is advantageous to do so, such cheaper resources are imported from the country which is able to supply it. In this case an investment, training, is required to produce the resource, but this investment IS COMPENSATED FOR as included in the economic cost of the import. We would expect that the employment of our model would result, as it does in most other cases of comparative advantage, in an exploitation of this profitable exchange- in this case an increase in investment in training of medical personnel in those poorer countries. Of course an increase in the supply of trained medical personnel is of enormous benefit to the global community. The inevitable disparity in wages offered between countries would result in the similarly inevitable disparity in aptitude of trained medical personnel being expressed, as it is in all other labour markets, through wage differentials. There will be some medics trained in poorer countries for whom the salary offered in their home country will be appropriate and desired, as well as those exceptional medics, liable to appear in any country around the world, whose services are more desired and therefore capable of earning higher wages. For this they will migrate, and they have a right to, and the country they were trained in will benefit from having cultivated such a precious resource. Our model is the expression of the international market for resources acting freely. If the motion were ‘Rich countries should actively recruit artists from poorer countries’ or ‘construction workers’, such an exchange would be considered laudable both on an individual level, which will be looked at next, and as demonstration of the efficient relocation of specialist workers to the place where they can be best rewarded for their human capital, and have the potential to actualise their training in the way that they most want to. On proposition side, we question whether medical personnel are any different, except for the important fact that their training may be compensated for and profited from, in a way that the status quo, with all other forms of economic migrants, does not account for.