LinkedIn has quantified India’s brain drain.
By analyzing global migration trends among professionals, the social network found India ended 2014 with 0.23% fewer workers than the beginning of the year. This represents the biggest loss seen in any country it tracked, according to LinkedIn. (To calculate migration activity, LinkedIn, which has 380 million users worldwide, looked at the net gain or loss in members as a percentage of its membership in the country.)
For the Indians who left, close to half found jobs in technology companies abroad, and most of them ended up in the US, even with the country’s strict quota on visas for high-skilled workers.
Many Indians also migrated to the United Arab Emirates, which conversely saw the biggest gain in professionals from other countries. Of the LinkedIn users who moved to the UAE, the majority (28%) came from India, far more than the combined workers of other countries in the region.
LinkedIn researcher Sohan Murthy tells Quartz that technology, financial services, and professional services were the main industries that drove migration trends last year. But there were some exceptions. In Saudi Arabia, for example, oil and engineering contributed to its 0.85% gain in professionals from other countries. And in Germany, the transportation, aeronautical, and automotive industries drove its 0.44% increase in workers.
Here’s a list of the 20 countries that saw the most migration activity, according to LinkedIn: