Book chapter
Стягивание населения с периферии в региональные центры: Россия и Европейский Север
Migration is a powerful driver and important consequence of economic, political and social change. Because of its great impact on societies, migration needs to be adequately measured and understood. Reliable statistical data is the key to the basic understanding of this important phenomenon. Yet, in many countries, even the most general statistics on migration are incomplete, out-of-date or do not exist. Improvement in this area requires knowledge of the principles of collecting, compiling and analyzing migration statistics. Likewise, policymakers and other users need to be aware of the definitions and measurement issues related to the data to be able to interpret them. The present guide was prepared under the responsibility of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in the framework of the project “Strengthening national capacities to deal with international migration: maximizing development benefits and minimizing negative impacts”. The project involved all five regional commissions of the United Nations and was financed from the United Nations Development Account. The guide is intended for practitioners and professionals whose work is related to migration and migration statistics. It focuses on the specific context of migration processes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We expect that the practical examples and international recommendations presented herein stimulate interest and improve understanding and facilitate production, dissemination and use of statistics on international migration.
In the early twentieth century, a large number of households resettled from the European to the Asian part of the Russian Empire. We propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 Stolypin land titling reform. One might expect better property rights to decrease the propensity to migrate by improving economic conditions in the reform area. However, this titling reform increased land liquidity and actually promoted migration by easing financial constraints and decreasing opportunity costs. Treating the reform as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ difference-in-differences analysis on a panel of province-level data that describe migration and economic conditions. We find that the reform had a sizeable effect on migration. To verify the land liquidity effect, we exploit variation in the number of households participating in the reform. This direct measure of the reform mechanism estimates that land liquidity explains approximately 18% of migration during this period.
In this paper we study convergence among Russian regions. We find that while there was no convergence in 1990s, the situation changed dramatically in 2000s. While interregional GDP per capita gaps still persist, the differentials in incomes and wages decreased substantially. We show that fiscal redistribution did not play a major role in convergence. We therefore try to understand the phenomenon of recent convergence using panel data on the interregional reallocation of capital and labor. We find that capital market in Russian regions is integrated in a sense that local investment does not depend on local savings. We also show that economic growth and financial development has substantially decreased the barriers to labor mobility. We find that in 1990s many poor Russian regions were in a poverty trap: potential workers wanted to leave those regions but could not afford to finance the move. In 2000s (especially in late 2000s), these barriers were no longer binding. Overall economic development allowed even poorest Russian regions to grow out of the poverty traps. This resulted in convergence in Russian labor market; the interregional gaps in incomes, wages and unemployment rates are now below those in Europe. The results imply that economic growth and development of financial and real estate markets eventually result in interregional convergence.
The author shows that demographic transition is an organic part of civilization developments. Such phenomen as death rate and birth rate, changes in character of migration are connected with stages of development of a civilization.
Migration is a powerful driver and important consequence of economic, political and social change. Because of its great impact on societies, migration needs to be adequately measured and understood. Reliable statistical data is the key to the basic understanding of this important phenomenon. Yet, in many countries, even the most general statistics on migration are incomplete, out-of-date or do not exist. Improvement in this area requires knowledge of the principles of collecting, compiling and analyzing migration statistics. Likewise, policymakers and other users need to be aware of the definitions and measurement issues related to the data to be able to interpret them. The present guide was prepared under the responsibility of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in the framework of the project “Strengthening national capacities to deal with international migration: maximizing development benefits and minimizing negative impacts”. The project involved all five regional commissions of the United Nations and was financed from the United Nations Development Account. The guide is intended for practitioners and professionals whose work is related to migration and migration statistics. It focuses on the specific context of migration processes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We expect that the practical examples and international recommendations presented herein stimulate interest and improve understanding and facilitate production, dissemination and use of statistics on international migration.
In the article authors use the vital birh and death registration data on 10 regions exctracted from the Rosstat database to evaluate an input of international migrant into Russian fertility and mortality levels.
The report provides a review of sources and quality of statistics on international migration in selected countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation and Tajikistan. The report was prepared under the responsibility of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in the framework the project “Strengthening national capacities to deal with international migration: maximizing development benefits and minimizing negative impacts”.