Research Seminar on Diversity and Development

Dmitry Veselov, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences, presented his paper "Migration of Russian settlers and the legacy of interregional development in Kazakhstan" at another session of the regular Research Seminar on Diversity and Development.

The event was held on February 12, 2019, and was organized by ICSID, NES Center for the Study of Diversity and Social Interactions together with the seminar “Political Economy”.

Abstract: The paper explores the effect of migration of Russian settlers on the intra-regional development in Kazakhstan. We use the 1897 census dataset of the Russian Empire and modern economic data to provide links between the density of the Russian population in Kazakhstan and the current level of economic development. Exploiting exogenous geographic and geopolitical sources of variation across twenty-six districts (uyezd) we provide the empirical evidence of positive impact of the migration of Russians in XVIII-XIX centuries on the current level of development. The paper discusses several channels of such influence: human capital formation channel and the Soviet Union industrialization policy.