Business
Those who combine technical and business skill with the language, culture and institutional know-how of two markets are rare and valuable. Outsiders struggle to do business in an unfamiliar country, so these bridging people capture a premium and are prized by companies.
Skilled emigrants who go home contribute less by directly handing over technology than by searching beyond local routines for niches in the global economy. They then work with officials to redesign institutions to fit those niches. Small reforms of this kind can spread and add up to wider structural change.
Newer technology regions succeed when they specialize in what the leading center doesn't do, rather than trying to replicate it and competing head-on. One place handles manufacturing, process and integration while the leader pursues cutting-edge products, so the two reinforce each other.
As each technology region specializes, it becomes a node in a single worldwide production network. One supplies product vision and marketing, another low-cost engineering, another a fast supply chain, another IT services. Each depends on the others' strengths.
Professional networks of migrants let newcomers rapidly operate across two countries, start companies, and draw on partners' strengths in each place. The network, not the lone individual, makes cross-border ventures quick and feasible.
The growing capabilities of other countries can look threatening to a dominant economy. But when their growth comes through cross-border partnering and specialization, it creates new markets and capabilities that make the dominant country richer, not poorer.
When skilled emigrants keep ties to both their old and new countries, their departure stops being a one-way loss. Knowledge, money and contacts flow back and forth through their networks, so both places can gain. The real cost is that the home country loses many of its best people in the first place.
Venture capital is an organized way to search systematically for promising firms and nurture them into partners that can co-design products with others. Building it in emerging economies helps them plug into global networks. Lack of startup funding is a key barrier that such institutions address.
A publicly funded research agency can take technology developed abroad and transfer it to domestic manufacturers. This gives local firms a foothold in industries they couldn't have built from scratch.