This dissertation considers the effects of geographical and economic factors on migration in the USSR from 1965 to the present. The empirical portion of the study focuses on the determining factors of interregional moves. These moves represent a regional redistribution of the labor force essential under the current conditions of the mismatch of the location of labor and the location of natural resources and industrial capacity. Particular emphasis is placed upon the relative effects of traditional economic variables and the subset of quality of life variable and on the effect of traditional gravity variables. The study used origin- and destination-specific gravity models from the family of spatial interaction models to analyze the interregional flows and the geographical and economic factors. This yielded several important findings concerning the factors except for locations in the most accessibles European portion of the USSR. Per capita investment and the level of development of the service sector were important pull factors for migration in the 1960s and the 1980s. Neither the growth nor the level of regional concentration of industrial employment proved significant for analyzing the migration flows. The economic organization of the Soviet Union accounts for this apparent anomaly. The significant results for other economic and geographical variables indicate the appropriateness of using western theories to analyze migration in the Soviet case.
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