Trade ministers from around the world will gather at Cancun, Mexico from September 10-14 to negotiate the next stages of the Doha Development Agenda. The Doha negotiations, launched in November 2001 in Qatar, are potentially very important for poor developing countries given that trade is a major driving force of economic expansion in this globalising world.

Although the talks are likely to focus mainly on the trade of goods, particularly the use of farm subsidies, discussions on trade in services, especially with respect to labour mobility, could prove more important for poor nations. Under the framework of negotiations on the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) poor-country governments and some international development institutions have been pressing developed-nation governments to liberalise market access for temporary movement of Third World workers into their countries. While developed-country governments propagated the virtues of globalisation in terms of movement of goods and capital, they have been reticent in accepting the benefits of the free movement of labour and the integration of labour markets.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) says that participation of developing countries in the world economy can be significantly enhanced through liberalisation of market access in GATS for movement of natural persons (MNP) supplying services. In other words, by relaxing barriers and restrictions to Third World workers entering developed nations for temporary employment in servicing. In a recent report UNCTAD noted that even limited liberalisation in this area would provide gains to the world economy that exceeds those obtainable from liberalisation in traditional areas of trade. Such gains, it is said, would accrue to both rich and poor countries; sending and recipient nations.

Least developed countries (LDC) at the World Trade Organisation negotiations on GATS are contending that the temporary movement of people is one of the most important means of supplying services internationally. In early September, Bangladesh's ambassador, Dr Toufiq Ali, said numerous estimates show that the potential benefits of free trade in services may be several times that of free trade in goods. And the most important means of supplying services was through "the export of services supplied by less skilled persons," he stressed.

The World Bank estimates that increasing developed countries' quota on the inward movements of temporary workers, up to 3 percent of their workforce would result in additional income gains for developing countries of as much as US$160 billion. For developing countries, temporary labour emigration helps to reduce unemployment and provides an important source of foreign exchange, while recipient developed countries gain by filling skill shortages and reduce the impact of demographic pressure.

Proponents of labour market liberalisation want to see increased flow of workers from developing to developed countries with respect to not only to low and medium skilled workers, but also the highly skilled and professional. This campaign seems to contradict the assumption that developing nations already suffer from a brain drain and further export of skills would compound their problems. Third World anti-poverty groups have for long criticised developed nations for annually taking in thousands of skilled and highly qualified people from developing countries, in effect robbing them of the scarce human capital they need to escape poverty. It therefore seems callous for anyone to suggest that poor nations should export more of their human capital, even if only on a temporarily basis.

Over the years, there have been numerous reports claiming that the brain drain costs Africa billions of dollars a year. It is estimated that the drain has seen more than 40 percent of Africa's high-level managers and professionals desert their homelands for job opportunities in the West, a loss of intellectual and technical capacity that supposedly hurting the continent.

But is there really a brain drain? Has Africa really lost by having hundreds of thousands of its trained people working overseas, mainly in the West? The answer is no. The notion that Africa is short of human capital because of a brain drain is a myth. African private and public institutions, especially the latter, are inadequately staffed because they are unable to pay for the skilled manpower they need, not because of non availability. Nigerian hospitals are not lacking doctors because there are more Nigerian doctors working abroad than inside the country, which is the case, but because local hospitals are unable to employ more medical staff for lack of funds. If all Nigerian trained doctors overseas were to return home tomorrow, this would not necessarily increase the number of doctors working in hospitals, given that medical establishments in the country already struggle to pay those already in service.

We should distinguish between what a society needs and what it can pay for. No doubt, African countries as with other developing nations would greatly benefit from substantial increases in their doctor to population ratios - the same is true for other key professionals like teachers and engineers. But in reality, demand in most developing countries for such skilled and professional workers does not surpass supply - bearing in mind that demand is both the ability and desire to purchase. Unfortunately desire alone does not constitute demand.

The underlying cause of manpower shortage in developing countries is economic underdevelopment, not the depletion of intellectual and technical personnel due to a brain drain. Contrary to the assumption of a brain drain, the human resources problem facing developing countries is the underemployment of their skilled and highly qualified people. Most of these nations have trained more people than their economy can optimally absorb. Over the past decades they have rightly invested in education but unfortunately did not invest in developing the economy to utilise the stock of human capital.

Rather than view the movement of labour from poor to rich countries as a detrimental flow of resources we should see it as providing an outlet for excess manpower. Labour migration contributes to the building of human capital in developing countries by enabling them to train and educate more people than they can immediately utilise. They are able to draw from the stock, through the return of nationals working overseas, as their economic capacity increases, as we have seen in China, India and other fast developing Asian countries.

Apart from providing additional employment opportunities, the export of labour is a major source of foreign exchange income and investment for many developing countries. The importance of home remittance is second only to that of direct foreign investment and exceeds that of foreign aid received. According to the World Bank in 2001, remittances from both permanent and temporary migrants provided some US$71 billion to developing countries, nearly 40 percent more than all official development assistance. Home remittances by Indian workers overseas is a major source of income for India, the amount having steadily increased from just over US$2 billion in the early 1980s to around US$13 billion in 2001. Home remittances from Nigerians living overseas is more than US$1 billion a year, which is far more than Nigeria's entire non-oil export revenue. And this is without concerted government effort to encourage citizens abroad to invest in their home economy.

The impact of income from overseas workers on economic growth can be significant because the money is not transferred to corrupt governments but directly to people and companies, thereby boosting domestic demand.

Football fans in Nigeria may be denied the opportunity of watching the skills of international football stars like Nwanko Kanu and Jay-Jay Okocha but these footballers have probably contributed more to the Nigerian economy as highly paid temporary workers abroad than they would have had they stayed home as members of low-paying local soccer clubs. This is not to suggest that all Nigerian footballers should work in Europe, though it is doubtful whether the standard of Nigerian football league would have been higher had the many Nigerian footballers currently playing abroad had not migrated. It takes more than the availability of talented players to produce a winning team - it also requires competent management and suitable facilities.

No doubt there are drawbacks for developing countries in exporting skilled workers, especially when it reduces the average level of human capital below the level they can pay for so they end up having to employ under-qualified or inexperienced people. But in most cases the problem facing poor developing countries is not the quality of the manpower left behind but a political order that encourages mediocrity.