Faced with having to wait until they are the age of their grandparents to become senior, many of Italy's best and brightest leave. Universities in America and Britain are full of Italian academics too ambitious to sit around for decades to get tenure in Italy. International bureaucracies such as the World Bank, IMF and OECD are replete with Italians wielding PhDs. Brussels is another escape hatch: Italy is a great provider of dedicated Eurocrats. Perhaps the single most damning indicator of Italy's current economic health is that it is the only net exporter of graduates among rich European countries, something more commonly associated with developing countries than with developed ones (see chart).