Exporting Economists

Greg Mankiw posted an interesting excerpt from the Washington Post today, about the impact of an academic brain drain in developing countries:

As Washington looks south at a rising tide of Hugo Chávez-led populism, it must rue the fact that two of Latin America's most high-profile supporters of free markets now reside at U.S. universities. Former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who tamed his country's inflation and transformed its economy, is now a professor at Brown University. And after serving as Mexico's budget secretary and president during the 1990s, U.S. ally Ernesto Zedillo returned to Yale, his alma mater, to direct its center on globalization.

Similarly, as U.S. policymakers contemplate how India's intransigence contributed to the recent failure of the World Trade Organization to reduce trade barriers, they must wonder whether Indian free-trade guru and economist Jagdish Bhagwati could have tilted the balance back home if he still lectured at the Indian Statistical Institute or the Delhi School of Economics rather than Columbia University....
The United States must export more pro-Americans than it imports. Maybe it's time to round up all these sympathetic foreigners -- and send them home.

Reading about Keynes' influence over the British government, one wonders if these talented professors could have helped their homelands. Regardless, it's no reason to evict them.