Return labor migration in Russia: scale and trends

One of the leading causes of population mobility is labor migration. Return labor migration types can act as a tool to reduce territorial differences in the labor market, as well as to increase the homogeneity of socio-economic development of Russia’s entities. Studying the return labor migration is a necessary condition for the sustainable development of territories. The purpose of the article is to analyze the internal interregional labor migration in Russia, its scale and flow parameters. We conduct the study on the basis of statistical data on the migration movement of the Federal State Statistics Service of the Russian Federation. Rosstat has been monitoring the movements of labor migrants between Russia’s entities since 2011. Since 2013, Rosstat considers the information on the frequency of return of labor migrants to permanent residence. As a result of the conducted research, we have found that, since 2013, the number of internal interregional labor migrants has increased. The gender structure of interregional internal labor migrants is characterized by a disproportion: the number of men exceeds the number of women. In general, the most common are daily labor interregional movements, as well as returns to permanent residence at least once a month. Women more often make daily trips to work in other regions of RF, and men more often practice returning home less than once a month. We have identified two groups of federal districts: the first group includes federal districts with a positive balance of internal labor interregional migration, which may mean greater territorial attractiveness for internal interregional labor migrants; the second group of federal districts is characterized by an excess of the number of people leaving for work in other entities over the number of people entering, which indicates that internal interregional labor migrants are not fixed in these federal districts and do not create stable working relationships.