Geographical mobility of manpower in the USSR

"The Soviet Union is experiencing a substantial reduction in the growth of its working-age population, accompanied by a shift in the distributional pattern of population growth, with the largest increases occurring in regions where geographical mobility is low. After describing the types and scales of manpower migration in the USSR, the [authors discuss] the means used to encourage workers to move to the sparsely populated developing regions and away from large cities. This is achieved primarily through incentives, with wage differentials decreasing in importance compared with incentives bearing on the quality of life; restrictive measures have a purely corrective function."