By topping up, national specialists could gradually replace expatriate ones contracted by the previous pooling agreement.
Expatriate MD contracting in Mozambique has been a history of effective policy and also a rare example of sound pragmatism which prevailed against old-fashioned nationalist wishful thinking.
The Ministry of Health (MOH) managed to make up for its severe scarcity of specialist MDs especially through contracting expatriate technical assistance.
Several expatriate contacts begged off.
Officials say one reason for focusing on the local population is the precarious situation created by too much reliance on a transient, contract-based, expatriate labor force — as many as 80 percent of the regional workers — that occupies top positions in the public and private sectors.
International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) secretary general Sharon Burrow noted after a visit to Oman last month that the Gulf state had just about as many migrant workers as Qatar does but that its laws did not discriminate between Omani and foreign workers even though Omanis, migrant workers and western expatriates have different contract terms.
With a 5-year contract, a good salary, and the possibility of gaining some research independence, RyC contracts offered Spanish expatriate scientists a deal that was too good to refuse.
The national political option to carry out a public sector decentralization policy could give rise to more individual contracts of national or expatriate MDs but, as it has been observed, decentralization has often remained a discourse, with civil service reform having been announced several times, but never really having materialized [ 22].
In the future, real willingness to decentralise responsibilities and competences, improvement in management capacity and cost considerations would be the factors favouring individual instead of collective contracting mechanisms for employment of expatriate MDs.
Rather than building full-service firms, they are concentrating on areas of law that complement their existing services: immigration, which sits nicely with expatriate tax work; labour, which goes with human-resources consulting; compliance; commercial contracts; and due diligence.
