Can State Language Policies Distort Students’ Demand for Education?

 

 

By Alexander Muravyev (IZA and St. Petersburg University GSOM) and Oleksandr Talavera (University of Sheffield)

With territory larger than Metropolitan France, and population over 45 million people, Ukraine is characterized by considerable ethnic diversity. Ukrainians are by far the largest ethnic group constituting 77.8% of the population. Russians are the second largest ethnic group amounting to 17.3% of the population. The other large minorities include Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, Poles, and Jews. An interesting feature of the country is a disproportional use of Russian by ethnic Ukrainians and other ethnic minorities, a heritage of the explicit and implicit Russification which occurred over most of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. In particular, numerous surveys in Ukraine in the early 2000s revealed that only half of ethnic Ukrainians chose Ukrainian as language of interview, 17.9% were indifferent between Ukrainian and Russian and 32.0% preferred Russian. Strong preference for Russian is also documented among other ethnic groups.