«Brain drain»: forced migration or conscious choice?

The article considers an important problem of modern society such as population migration, including "brain drain", which affects many aspects of modern society, while being considered as a complex social phenomen. For industrialized countries, this is one of the determining factors of economic prosperity in the context of modern international competition, as it affects, first of all, fairly wealthy segments of the population, and is one of the significant items of revenue to the state budget. The author notes that special attention is paid to this problem in Russia, as it has faced the primary consequences of a mass outflow of population, and this is, first of all, the loss of initiative, energetic, young, reproductive people and capital. The author describes the main causes and consequences of this phenomenon for society, a number of basic scientific concepts are highlighted that explain the reasons for the outflow of intellectual capital and the main periods of "brain drain" in Russia. The paper presents the statistical data of the Unified Interdepartmental Information and Statistical System (EMISS) on the number of citizens of the Russian Federation who went abroad for employment in 2017-2023 and ROSSTAT data on population migration in the Ulyanovsk region. The author proposes the measures to solve the problem of "brain drain".