Cohort research on Russian youth intraregional migration

Ilya Kashnitsky, National Research University Higher School of Economics

As long as migration involves mainly young people, their relocation to the big cities has the strongest impact on sex-age structures both in core and peripheral areas. That’s why we are focusing our biggest part of attention on this particular age group in this paper. Unfortunately, Russian migration statistics is quite unreliable. It has failed to record “student age” movement in the last decades. So we consider the best way to fill this gap is to use the Census data. In this paper we used the so called “method of shifting ages”. The core idea is to compare cohorts in adjacent census years taking mortality into account. The discrepancy would stand for migration. The curtail advantage of this method is that, having appropriate data, we can evaluate migration losses and gains at any administrative level. Our data allows us to study intraregional population dynamics. As mortality is insignificant in youth cohorts, we are mostly dealing with migration. Our estimates show that during the last intercensus period (2002-2010) up to 70 percent of youth cohorts have left regional periphery for good after graduating school. For comparison, previous intercensus period (1989-2002) has shown only 40 percent decrease in periphery’s youth cohorts. At the end of the research author’s method of estimating the trend in regional center’s migration attractiveness for the youths is presented.