Migration of Russian Settlers and the Legacy of Inter-Regional Development in Kazakhstan

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 Russian settlements in Kazakhstan in 1897 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