Potential emigration of scientists from Slovenia in the mid 1990s

Emigration - especially of the most educated persons - is in most countries an unknown, or a very weakly registered phenomenon. The paper presents the methodology and the results of the analysis of potential emigration of researchers with master’s or doctor’s degrees from Slovenia in the mid 90s on the basis of survey of individuals. The analysis was carried out within the international project on brain drain of researchers in 10 Eastern and Central European countries. For many reasons (use of random sampling, large sample - 1000 of researchers or 29% of »population«, high response - 64%, etc.) the results are of great importance/usefulness for the state policy in the science sector in Slovenia. Main result is that the potential external mobility of Slovene scientists is high in absolute and in relative terms (in comparison to other 9 countries observed) and regarding the structure of this mobility/migration the potential brain loss is also considerable.