REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION, REMITTANCES, AND THE BRAIN DRAIN, EDITED BY

uring the last couple of years, international migration has attracted a great deal of attention in the development community. The convening of the Global Commission on International Migration followed by a UN High Level Dialogue on International Migration and Development, scheduled for September 2006, are reflections of this surge in interest. Until quite recently, the World Bank exhibited only peripheral interest in migration, either internally or internationally. This has changed, as witnessed by the release of Global Economic Prospects 2006 and the initiation, by the Development and Economics Research Group in the Bank, of their International Migration and Development Program. The volume edited by Özden and Schiff collects together the first set of studies conducted under this new research program. As the volume title suggests, three of the studies deal with the effects of remittances on incomes and measures of well-being, four address various aspects of highly skilled migration, while the remaining paper examines the determinants of migration from rural Mexico to the US. Each of these is certainly topical: the rise in reported global remittance flows has been a major spur to the recent surge in interest in migration, especially in Latin America; global movements of the highly skilled escalated rapidly in the 1990s leaving at least some countries very concerned