This chapter introduces the main features that characterize the health systems and mobility of medical doctors in both MENA and ECE countries taken together. The observed trends and patterns are confronted to the relative wages of medical doctors in each country. A descriptive analysis is conducted on relative wages of medical doctors as they prevail in MENA and ECE relative to EU besides the relative wages between MENA and ECE.
TopI. Methodological Approach
For the purpose of describing the main features related to the emigration of medical doctors from MENA and ECE countries to EU, four groups of countries are considered. There are (1) MENA countries excluding those composed of a majority of emigrants (Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and Yemen), (2) ECE (Belarus, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine), (3) other MENA countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and United Arab Emirates) and (4) Other European Countries - OEC (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom).
Among the determinants considered in the following chapters and in the analytical studies introduced above, the pertinent variables include relative wages of medical doctors, labor markets and demographic trends.
Databases were used to describe the emigration of physicians such as the one constructed by Docquier and Bhagrava (2006) and by Bhagrava, Docquier and Marfouk (2010). The databases provide information about the population of the counties, the number of physicians practicing domestically, the number of physicians per 1000 people and the emigration rate of physicians that is derived from the stock of physicians abroad taken as a percentage of medical doctors trained in their country of origin. The data for this latter is only available from 1991 to 2004 and it represents efforts of the Trade Team Development Research Group to measure the extent of brain drain in the international migration and development program. The main countries of destination for physicians coming from the MENA and other regions are the United Kingdom, USA, France, Canada, Germany, Belgium, Australia, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and Austria.