Rate of emerging nations' brain drain surges: ADB

Makati City, Philippines

NYL Patangan, a nursing graduate from the Philippines, left his native land in search of a better life. Now working in a Chicago hospital after a stint in Dubai, he's supporting his parents back home and is buying his mother a Toyota Vios.

A recent study by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) shows that the number of immigrants with university degrees who left to work in richer nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) surged 66 per cent in the decade through 2010-2011 to 2.8 million. More than half of them came from the Philippines, with hundreds of thousands more working in regions outside the OECD such as the Middle East.