Where Are Educated Young People from Russia’s Eastern Regions Headed and Why

By their choice of place of study and work, young people significantly determine the human potential of Russia and its individual territories. It drives migration processes and thus contributes to concentration of half the country’s population in one-third of its regions. Young people strive to receive high incomes, employment opportunities in innovative areas, and conditions for a long and healthy life. The problem of depopulation of the regions of Siberia and the Far East is the result of the weak regulatory influence of socioeconomic institutions that are unable to provide compensatory incentives for retaining the local population. Some eastern regions are more active than the national average in participating in replenishment of the population and youth education, but they receive fewer dividends from these investments due to the migration of young people to the central and southern regions of the country and abroad. This asymmetry, when human potential is created in some regions and realized in others, requires immediate overcoming, including within the framework of national projects aimed at diversifying the regional economies of Asian Russia.