Patterns of Human Capital Development in Russia: Meeting the Challenge of Market Reforms and Globalization

This paper examines post-Soviet reforms on human capital development in Russia. The primitivization of economy in the first decade of reforms resulted in growing underemployment of skilled labour that drove out two streams of brain drain, viz. one, through classical emigration, and two, through the outflow of skilled labour into a wide range of survival activities from shuttle trade to subsistence farming. The consequences of this for the Russian economy were dire as it led to the depreciation and degradation of the national human capital stock. The second decade of reforms generated controversial implications for Russia’s national human capital. On the one hand, it was characterized by the emergence and exacerbation of a wide range of supply-demand human capital mismatches. On the other hand, the revival of labour demand and the partial substitution of direct brain drain for outsourcing widened opportunities for the preservation and accumulation of national human capital.