Regional out-migration patterns in Russia

Abstract

Russian society has been perceived by many scholars as relatively immobile. Migration abroad is indeed not as common in Russia as it is, for example, in Ukraine or Moldova, whose citizens migrate abroad in large numbers to improve their living standards. Leaving aside the deliberations whether Russians are less mobile than other big world populations this text concentrates on differences between Russian regions in patterns of mobility focusing on migration outflows. Given the size of the country and socio-economic diversity of its regions, Russia constitutes an interesting object of investigations. The analysis of regional diversity of migration outflows was performed using several sources of migration data – the official Population Registry data, Labour Force Survey (LFS) data and the results of Russian population censuses. The paper examines regional differences of different types of migration outflows (intra-, interregional and international). Spatial diversity has been presented by means of choropleth maps based on values of a complex index constructed separately for each migration type. Cluster analysis which was used to identify different types of regions in terms of diverse mobility patterns has shown that there is quite a clear division into European and Asian part of Russia. The paper ends with a brief discussion of implications of out-migration and shortly touch upon migration policy issues.