The Welfare State in Competition for Global Talent

The book merges the views of regional development and innovation environments with the international migration of highly skilled labour. Globalisation and the knowledge economy shape the labour market of experts and create the global field of choices for individual knowledge holders and their families. The question is: Why do highly skilled experts choose to live and work in a particular place in this particular context? What are the roles of international regulations, nation-states and regions in the process? The book is based on a multidisciplinary research project and is among the first of its kind on international level. The case study focuses on foreign professionals and experts working in high-tech organisations in Finnish innovation environments (556 answers to questionnaire and over 140 personal interviews in the fields of ICT and biotech), but the theoretical focus is on the interfacing of the global and the local.