The governments of many poor countries spend considerable resources educating young professionals, such as engineers, doctors and nurses. Many of these graduates emigrate and use their skills to the benefit of rich countries, such as the US, Canada and Britain. There is little doubt that this is a highly regressive outcome.

In the early 1970s Professor Jagdish Bhagwati suggested a solution to the problem, which is to impose a small additional tax on these graduates with the proceeds being reimbursed to the source (educating) country. Professor Bhagwati lamented at the time that institutional arrangements related to the collection of the ‘tax’ – it is in fact more like a debt – were not sufficiently developed to allow this to happen easily. However, with the advent of income contingent loan collection systems, such as HECS in Australia, and now similar schemes in New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and England, it would appear to be the case that such a scheme has a potentially strong administrative base.

This forum will be chaired by Professor Bruce Chapman, ANU Crawford School of Public Policy, and will feature Professor Bhagwati, now Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and University Professor at Columbia University; Professor James Mirrlees, a Nobel Laureate and a pioneer in the area of taxation theory, Professor Miranda Stewart, Co-Director of Taxation Studies, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne; and Professor Glenn Withers Arndt-Corden Economics Department, Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU.