8%
is the mere share of people who have left their jobs and for a certain period of time did not look for new work but who later returned to the formal labour market.
22%
is the minimum share of Russian workers who have ‘excessive’ education for their jobs.
Demographic Decline to Support Labour Market
The labour market in Russia differs from that in other countries. The Russian labour market does not react to decline and crisis with growing unemployment, and the market recuperates quickly. The reason for this is that employers have a great amount of flexibility; they do not fire employees, instead cutting their pay and work hours, according to the Deputy Director of HSE’s Centre for Labour Market Studies Rostislav Kapeliushnikov.
65%
of Russian companies are freezing their employees’ salaries during the economic crisis.
Russians Won’t Allow Themselves to Become Unemployed
The Russian labour market is very mobile. People change jobs often, exiting the labour market only to enter it again. Those who are temporarily out of work do not manage to become officially unemployed since such a move would make no economic sense. Around a third of all unemployed Russians are outside of the governmental and statistical realm, according to the Director of HSE’s Centre for Labour Market Studies, Vladimir Gimpelson, and a Junior Research Fellow in the Centre, Anna Sharunina.
58%
is the share of the Russian labour market that should be occupied by experts who have a technical education. 70% of state-funded places in universities are allotted to technical specialties.
More Than a Third of Companies Hire Employees Under Fixed-term Contracts
It is becoming more and more common for employers to hire workers under fixed-term contracts. This allows companies to save money and more easily adapt to the changing conditions of the market. Flexible employment regulations do not, however, foster growth in productivity or an adequate reallocation of resources on the labour market, the Deputy Head of HSE’s Laboratory for Labour Market Studies, Larisa Smirrnykh, posits.
Professional Education Promotes Labour Productivity
Most Russian company owners invest in the continuing education of their employees, but not all of them. The lucky ones are 10-20% of all staff. Such spending looks risky even though the return on it is high. Continuing education increases salary by 8% on average, which is an indirect sign of the same improvement in the labour productivity of the educated staff, Pavel Travkin, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE Laboratory for Labour Market Studies, found.
Russians Only Live Well Thanks to ‘Grey’ Incomes
The widespread belief that wage increases in Russia outstrip growth in productivity is no more than a myth, Deputy Director of the HSE Centre for Labour Market Studies, Rostislav Kapelyushnikov claims in an article ‘Productivity and wages: a little simple arithmetic’. Besides, in recent years we have seen a fall in the cost of labour, particularly in industry.
Soviet ‘Science Cities’ Promote Small Business
Naukograds, meaning ‘science cities,’ focused largely on science in the Soviet period, but have since become aimed more at small business and business services in the post-soviet era, Denis Ivanov, a Research Fellow with HSE’s International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development, said in the paper, ‘Transition and Path-dependence in Knowledge-intensive Industry Location: Case of Russian Professional Services,’ which was presented at a joint seminar of HSE’s Laboratory for Labour Market Studies and the Centre for Labour Market Studies.