The Chance to Build

MEET Nuwan, a composite character built from the experiences of many Sri Lankan students rather than a real individual. He is in the final year of an engineering degree. His grades are strong, his list of completed projects is longer than most of his classmates', and his ambition is unusually specific: he wants to start a company in his own country.

For now, he works part-time behind the counter of a café. Local IT firms have rejected every application he has sent, perhaps without anyone ever reading them. A 2024 survey of 948 American business leaders, commissioned by the job-advice site Resume Builder, found that 51 per cent of their companies already used artificial intelligence in hiring. That survey covered American firms, not Sri Lankan ones, but automated screening can reject any CV that does not tick a job's listed boxes.

Nuwan's parents would like him to take a Master's abroad and, quietly, not come back. Last week a friend who left for Britain messaged to say he had founded his own start-up. Anyone who has studied in Sri Lanka in the past few years will recognise him.

He is also part of a record. According to figures from the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment and the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, summarised by the University of Peradeniya economist Prasanna Perera, 312,836 Sri Lankans left the country for work in 2024, the highest figure in its history. In the first nine months of 2025 more than three in four departures were classed as skilled, up from two in three in 2022.

Remittances, the money workers abroad send home to their families, reached a record US$8.07 billion in 2025. The Harvard Business School economist William Kerr has shown how heavily the world's most skilled people cluster in a handful of innovation hubs, such as Silicon Valley and London.

Governments in developing countries usually respond with a mix of three tools: tax breaks, public-sector pay rises, and "bonding" schemes, which legally require graduates, often those whose education the state paid for, to work at home for a set number of years before they may leave. All three treat emigration as a pricing problem: pay people enough, or make leaving expensive enough, and they will stay.

This article argues that the policy targets the wrong problem. A poor country cannot win a talent auction against a rich one; no plausible Sri Lankan salary will match what a software engineer earns in California. What a developing economy can offer is agency: the power to make real decisions early in a career and own the results.

The institution best placed to supply that is the start-up. Governments that want to keep their most ambitious graduates should stop trying to outbid London and start removing the obstacles that prevent young people from building companies at home.

The Ladder and the Stake

Consider what a "good job" at home actually offers someone like Nuwan. In many established firms, and in most of the public sector, promotion depends on how long you have been there rather than how well you perform, and a talented 23-year-old can expect to spend years several rungs below anyone with the authority to act on his ideas.

Economists call features like these push factors: conditions at home that drive people away. In April 2026 Perera noted, citing the Institute of Policy Studies, that Sri Lankan professionals most often give politicised appointments and bureaucratic inefficiency as their reasons for leaving, and warned that treating the problem as purely about money has produced the wrong policies.

Evidence elsewhere points the same way. In a 2021 study, Marina Latukha and her colleagues surveyed 557 graduates from leading Russian universities, a different country but a similar dilemma, and found that conditions in their industry and personal factors, such as chances for self-fulfilment, shaped whether they intended to emigrate more than broad national problems did.

Start-ups are built to supply exactly those things. First, they offer equity, a share of ownership in the company, so that if the business succeeds, the employee succeeds with it. Second, they are flat by necessity: with five people and no middle managers, the person closest to a problem usually decides what to do about it.

The American writer Daniel Pink's book Drive makes the psychological case, arguing that once people are paid enough to stop worrying about money, they are driven by autonomy, mastery and purpose: control over their work, getting better at something that matters, and working towards something bigger than themselves.

The condition matters, though: for a graduate working in a café, basic needs are plainly not yet met. A start-up that cannot pay a living wage is a luxury for people who can already afford risk, which is why the answer lies less in inspiring founders than in making founding financially survivable.

A Big Fish in a Growing Pond

The case for staying rests on what is left to build. In a rich economy, most basic infrastructure already exists, so talented graduates often end up improving it: sharper advertising algorithms, faster checkout pages. In Sri Lanka, many basic problems remain unsolved: digital payments for people without bank accounts, software that works properly in Sinhala and Tamil, and crop insurance priced for monsoon risk.

Consider PickMe, a home-grown ride-hailing and delivery app launched in 2015. According to the news site Rest of World, by early 2024 it had more than 100,000 active drivers and operated in districts far from Colombo, such as Trincomalee and Polonnaruwa, while its global rival Uber operated in five districts. That is what a big fish in a growing pond looks like.

This changes the opportunity cost of emigrating, the value of the best alternative you give up whenever you make a choice. For an ambitious engineer, leaving means giving up not only family and home but the chance to be among the first to solve a problem rather than one of thousands polishing a solution someone else built.

History suggests that departures need not be permanent losses. Taiwan and South Korea both lost large numbers of students abroad in the decades after the Second World War, yet became among the world's most dynamic economies.

The sociologist AnnaLee Saxenian called the engineers who eventually went back from Silicon Valley to Taiwan, Israel, India and China the "new Argonauts", after the Greek heroes who sailed abroad for the Golden Fleece; many returned not for secure corporate jobs but to start companies, turning brain drain into brain circulation.

A Kauffman Foundation survey of 153 returnees to India and China found that 72 per cent of the Indians and 81 per cent of the Chinese thought the opportunities to start a company were better at home, while fewer than one in ten said visa problems had played a very important part in their decision to return.

Even those who never return can help. A 2025 review of the evidence in the journal Science found that the chance to work abroad can raise the number of skilled people at home. For every Filipino nurse who went abroad, nine new nurses were licensed, and India's IT boom was built partly by computer scientists who trained for American jobs but never got visas. Leaving is not the enemy. A home economy with nothing to come back to is.

What Governments Should Actually Do

First, stop making the problem worse. Subsidising old industries preserves exactly the rigid, seniority-driven workplaces that push graduates out. Bonding schemes delay departures by making staying feel like a sentence rather than a choice. One of the Science review's authors, the Yale economist Mushfiq Mobarak, puts it bluntly: "putting barriers to exit is never a good policy".

The second step is to remove friction for founders, and above all to fix finance. Industry figures compiled by KPMG Sri Lanka in 2021 showed that about half of Sri Lankan start-ups were self-funded, with only around one in eight backed by angel investors, wealthy individuals who fund very young firms, and fewer still by venture capital. The returnee founders in the Kauffman survey told a similar story: 86 per cent of the Indian companies had been funded from personal savings.

So governments should make it quick and cheap to register a company, reform the rules that hold back venture investment, and create credit for young people who cannot offer collateral, an asset, such as a family house, that a bank can seize if a loan is not repaid. None of this requires speeches about patriotism. It requires plumbing.

The third step is to avoid the opposite mistake. Wim Naudé, Melissa Siegel and Katrin Marchand find that the evidence for migrants and returnees as "super-entrepreneurs" is weak, and warn that policies built on that belief can do more harm than good. Telling young people to start companies without fixing the barriers that make it hard simply loads the risk onto individuals.

Where Start-ups Fall Short

This case has real limits. Most start-ups fail, and in every economy they employ only a small share of workers. The argument applies to a narrow group, highly skilled and highly mobile graduates, not to the nurses, domestic workers and tradespeople whose reasons for leaving are more immediately about income.

Even the returnee story is contested: Martin Kenney and his colleagues argue that returnees were not critical in the initial formation of the IT industries of Taiwan, India and China, where local entrepreneurs and policymakers had laid the groundwork first, although returnees played an active part in the later phase.

Start-ups also need a stable economy. In 2022, the rupee lost 44.8 per cent of its value against the US dollar, according to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, and no founder can plan confidently around swings of that size.

Start-ups cannot substitute for sound economic management. They are not, however, a reason to keep relying on policies that have already failed.

The More Interesting Bet

The traditional response to brain drain fails because it misunderstands what is being lost. It is not only labour that leaves a country; it is ambition, and ambition goes wherever it is allowed to act. Tax breaks and bonding schemes treat the symptom. The underlying problem is a mismatch between what capable young people want to do and what institutions at home currently let them do.

Nuwan does not need a slightly higher starting salary to stay. He needs a country where a 23-year-old with a good idea and no connections can register a company in a week, raise a small amount of money without putting his parents' house at risk, and spend his twenties building something rather than waiting his turn.

The countries that win the next decade will not be the ones that pay the highest starting salaries. They will be the ones where staying is no longer a sacrifice, but the more interesting bet. The salary will always be higher somewhere else. The chance to build does not have to be.