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.
http://cadmus.eui.eu/handle/1814/31382
