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Attracting Skilled Labour to the North: Migration Loss and Policy Implications Across Russia’s Diverse Artic Regions
This paper identifies education, skills training and improved social infrastructure as key development issues to address population decline in regions of steady out-migration from the Russian Arctic. Migration flows are mostly stabilized after the sharp and unexpectedly large population decline in the Arctic in the 1990s, during the transition to a market economy. However, the trends set in motion during that collapse, including falling general levels of education, declining size of all but the largest cities, and aging of the populace, are deepening in consequence for some regions, even where government resettlement programs exist. As young professionals continue to leave, resettling com-patriates and hiring shift labour may contribute to the vitality of more resilient regions, for example, Krasnoyarsk and Yamalo-Nenets. However, the European part of the Russian Arctic, despite its critical importance to commerce and to military security, and despite assistance programs and subsidies, is conforming more to the aging, less productive contours of neighbouring Artic states on the periphery of Europe.