The Migration of Medical Workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and Substitution Policy

Substitution policies are strategies sometimes chosen in Sub-Saharan Africa
for curtailing the shortage of health professionals especially caused by the outflow
of medical personnel. The aim of our contribution is to propose a way to assess
the merits and drawbacks of substitution policies by developing a simple growth
model of healthcare productivity with medical brain drain. Within this framework,
we use a medical care production function of the ces type which aggregates low
and high specialized health workers. We then run simulations which compare
scenarios with and without substitution strategies by using data from the Ghana’s
medical sector.