State-run think tanks suffer brain drain

More than three in four employees at state-run think tanks quit within the first three years, a trend that has continued for more than a decade, arousing concerns of a possible “brain drain” at the country’s most prestigious policy institutions, a lawmaker said Monday.

Data submitted to Rep. Lee Hack-young of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea from the National Research Council for Economics Humanities and Social Sciences (NRC) showed that out of the 7,385 researchers who left such think tanks since 2010, 5,677, or 76 percent, had worked there for less than three years.

Among these, 2,664 worked between one and three years, while 3,013 quit less than a year after joining the institutes.

This has led to the current 4,121 workers at the research bodies under the NRC publishing only 227 papers listed on the Science Citation Index (SCI) in 2018.

The SCI is a citation index launched in 1964 and is known as one of the world’s leading science and technology bodies of work because of its rigorous selection process.

“At the risk of being oversimplifying, the figure means that each researcher contributed only 5 percent of one paper out of the 227 listed. While the number of SCI-listed papers does not guarantee the competence of individual researchers and institutes, it is widely considered a measure of explaining the country’s research capabilities on the global stage,” Lee said.

The brain drain, Lee added, continues because monetary compensation at the state-run institutes is far lower than that at their private counterparts. “State-run think tanks with limited budgets are known to pay less than private entities including universities. Given many of them were born after 1969, once they retire at 60, they have no source of income for five years until they are eligible to receive a state pension,” Lee said.

Their short-term, task-specific research work is mostly for government policy viability reviews, meaning they are not free from pressure to produce findings that suit those currently in power.

“Most of the workers want to improve their research capabilities not toe the government line, but under the current circumstances, they have no option. Structural reform is needed for them to think and create high-value work,” he added.