Abstract

Large-scale migration of Russian citizens to Kazakhstan in 2022–2023 represents one of the most significant recent cases of a sudden, politically driven mobility in the post-Soviet space. Almaty, as the country’s largest city, became a primary immigration destination, even though a large fraction of it has been transitory.

This paper examines the impact of immigration flows from Russia to regional economy of Almaty city using a simple structural econometric model. We explore the effect of district-level inflows of Russian migrants on various sectors of the city economy at a level of 8 districts of Almaty in 2010-2024, split up to two period: pre-war (2010-2021) and wartime (2022-2024). Sectors of economic activities include professional, scientific, and technical services; management and consulting, information and IT, architectural and engineering, building and office maintenance, creative and cultural industries, advertising, rental, repair, sports and recreation, legal and accounting, real estate, and employment services, all in terms of their monetary values in the respective years. Altogether, our empirical analysis covers a panel of 14 years over 8 districts of Almaty, conducted for twenty urban service sectors. To identify causal effects, we employ a difference-in-differences model, controlling for fixed effects, capital and human resources, and exploit variation in migration flows from Russia before and after the 2022 migration shock. This approach allows us to capture how migration-driven spatial concentration translates into differentiated trajectories of sectoral development across the city districts.

The estimated effects are overall statistically significant, declining effect of migrants for most sectors of the city economy. Specifically, while the overall effect of migrants is positive, returns to scale of Russian migration in pre-war period is mostly negative. This tendency, however, reverses for the war migrants: the difference-in-differences estimator is highly significant and positive for most of the sectors, especially for services. This effect can be attributed to higher average human capital of this wave of migrants, agglomeration effects, and institutional adaptation, especially in such industries as informatics and IT, science and technologies, real estate services and cultural products.

The paper contributes to migration scholarship by offering one of the first quantitative, district-level assessments of post-2022 migration impacts in the CIS context, highlighting how migration reshapes cities through intertwined demographic, economic, and social processes.