Human capital flight: The Brain drain from Russia

This thesis will analyze the reasons of movement of highly skilled labor and will concentrate on the case of Russia.Based available data, Russia, the country which has generated so many Nobel laureates in mathematics and and other fields of science is somehow not able to keep highly educated professionals and people with intellectual potential in the country. Resulting “brain drain” brings a positive externality to other countries benefiting from inflow of skilled labor, but to the expense of Russia. Further increase of this outflow can lead to a situation known from developing world, where lack of skilled labor may lead to a shortage of skilled workers and re-orientation of the country to production with low added value, limiting its growth potential. Therefore, I feel worthy to describe and analyze this phenomenon, its significance and the reasons for its existence.In the theoretical part of the thesis, I will describe the popular gravity and push-pull models of migration and summarize current state of knowledge on brain-drain and migration of skilled labor force.In the practical part of the thesis, firstly I will provide stylized facts about migration and brain drain from Russia and its development over time. This will be followed by estimating a model of migration flows based on pull and push factors, trying to explain their relative influence on resulting flows. The hypothesis that I would like to consider and prove is that the "brain drain" does not directly affect the economic situation in the Russian Federation, in particular on GDP. I will consider period from 1990-2019, using data on migration and other economic variables. The data will be sourced from the Migration Data Portal, statistics of Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation and statistics of Federal State Statistic Service of the Russian Federation (Rosstat).