Home – Home – Jornals – Region: Economics and Sociology 2018 number 3

Drawing from the data on the home buyers ’ addresses, we estimate the purchasing activity of Russians in the primary real estate market of Moscow metropolitan area (MMA) and compare it to their labor migration activity. The objects of analysis are 149 cities and 80 «rests of regions». This article is the first ever to examine the peculiarities of migration and investment behavior with differentiation between cities and rural areas, between size classes of settlements and individual large cities. Thus, the paper makes it possible to fill a gap in assessing the mobility of the factors ofproduction, namely capital and labor. We reveal a sharp contrast between settlements of different sizes in terms of how they interact with the metropolitan agglomeration. The bigger the settlement, the less is the intensity of labor migration to the capital; the intensity is decreasing in a rapid and monotonous manner. The activity of foreign buyers depending on the population of the city where they reside varies non-monotonously, with a maximum for cities with a population of250-500 thousand people in the real estate market of Moscow and 100-500 thousand people in Moscow Oblast. For MMA, small towns and rural areas (except for Khanty-Mansi and Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Areas) are a source of labor resources while their buying activity in the real estate market is weak. Cities with a population of over one million practically do not create an inflow of labor migrants and show moderate activity in the Moscow real estate market. Moscow Oblast interacts through labor migration and housing acquisitions with smaller settlements than the «premium» real estate and labor markets of Moscow. The attraction of Moscow Oblast is rapidly decreasing with distance, extending to the first- and second-order neighbors, while Moscow’s influence spreads throughout the country.