This paper examines the effects of both permanent and temporary emigration on human capital
formation and economic growth of the source regions. To achieve this end, this paper explores the
Chinese provincial panel data from 1980 to 2005. First, the fixed effects model is employed to
estimate the effect of emigration on school enrollment rates in the source regions. Relative to this
aspect, we find that the magnitude (scale) of permanent emigrants (measured by the permanent
emigration ratio) is conducive to the improvement of both middle and high schools enrollments.
In contrast, the magnitude of temporary emigrants has a significantly positive effect on middle
school enrollment but does not have a significant effect on high school enrollment. More
interestingly, different educational attainments of temporary emigrants have different effects on
school enrollment. Specifically, the share of temporary emigrants with high school education
positively affects middle school enrollment, while the share of temporary emigrants with middle
school education negatively affects high school enrollment. Second, the instrumental variable
method is applied to estimate the effect of emigration on economic growth within the framework
of system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM). The estimation results suggest that both
permanent and temporary emigrations have a detrimental effect on the economic growth of the
source regions. Our empirical tests provide some new evidence to the "brain drain" debate, which
has recently received increasing attention.