Determinants of International Students Mobility

Previous studies on the topic of international students’ mobility were mostly concentrated on the students’ flows from non-English speaking countries to English-speaking countries and from developing countries to developed ones. There is lack of information about regional students’ migration, especially in the post-Soviet space. This paper aims to analyze determinants of international students’ mobility between former Soviet republics and Russian Federation. The research is based on the database that covers the period from 2000 to 2013 and consists of 183 observations. To estimate dependence between the size of international students’ flows (which represents the size of international students’ mobility) and different economic, geographical and socio-cultural factors gravity model was used. The significance of the gravity model core variables (distance between two countries, amount of students enrolled in a country of origin and in a host country) was proven. Estimation of our model confirmed positive influence of host country’s real GDP per capita in host country on the size of students’ flows as well.