Working paper
Migrants at the Russian Labour Market: Characteristics, Status, Mobility
This book focuses on the questions of how territorial differences in productivity levels and unemployment rates arise in the first place and why territorial differences in labor market performance persist over time. Unemployment divergence and unemployment club convergence have been touched on in a large number of works and have recently also been studied using spatial econometric analysis. In this book we aim to develop the debate to include several important new topics, such as: the reasons why structural changes in some sectors cause slumps in some regions but not in others; the extent to which agglomeration factors explain regional imbalances; the degree of convergence / divergence across EU countries and regions; the role of labor mobility in reducing / increasing regional labor market imbalances; the impact of EU and country-level regional policy in stimulating convergence; and the (unsatisfactory) role of active labor market policy in stimulating labor supply in the weakest economic areas.
The migratory situation in Russia in the 1990-2000th years is considered. Separate types of migration are analysed: repatriation, labor migration, internal migration
Demographic growth is an important factor of migration processes. Nowadays, its influence is best felt in sub-Saharan Africa, where the tempo of demographic growth is the highest in the world. The chapter discusses the impact demographic growth makes specifically on labor migration from Africa to economically developed nations.
Having unique data we investigate informal employment and “envelope payments” as additional costs of worker displacement in the Russian labor market. In particular we analyze whether displaced workers experience
more involuntary informal employment than their non-displaced counterparts. Our main results confirm
our contention that displacement entraps some of the workers in involuntary informal employment. Those who quit, in turn, experience voluntary informality for the most part, but there seems a minority of quitting workers who end up in involuntary informal jobs. This scenario does not fall on all the workers who separate but predominantly on workers with low human capital. Being able to distinguish between involuntary and voluntary informal employment our study contributes to the debate in the informality literature on the issue of segmented versus integrated labor markets. We also pursue the issue of informality persistence and find that informal employment is indeed persistent as some workers churn from one informal job to the next. Job separations in general and not displacement events per se are associated with larger “envelope payments”.
Moscow has always been a magnet attracting migrants from other regions of Russia. Recently, however, it plays an increasingly important role as the largest of Russia center of attraction for migrant flows from abroad. External migrants integrate in Moscow , transforming in the process the social, cultural, and physical dimensions of urban space. That is why the goal of this study is to explore this mutual influence between the city and the migrants from abroad living in it. How is life of migrants in Moscow organized? Are there any localities or spaces (coffee shops, restaurants, shops, etc) consistently visited by migrants? Does the 'migrant Moscow" exist", and if yes, how does it look like?
According to the existing literature, informality rates for Russia vary in a wide range from slightly more than 5 to nearly 30 percent. The question arises: what are causes and consequences of so huge variation? Using RMLS data for 2009 the paper investigates the degree of congruence between several alternative definitions of the informal employment in the context of Russian labor market. Analysis shows that depending on empirical definitions informality rates considerably differ – from 11 to 24 percent. With different approaches not only scale of the informal employment but also its socio-demographic profile radically changes. Furthermore, the econometric analysis reveals that the conditional impact of particular factors on the risk of informality varies considerably from one definition to another. This suggests that that estimates of the informal employment for Russia could hardly be regarded as methodologically robust.
One of the most important indicators of company's success is the increase of its value. The article investigates traditional methods of company's value assessment and the evidence that the application of these methods is incorrect in the new stage of economy. So it is necessary to create a new method of valuation based on the new main sources of company's success that is its intellectual capital.
The transition to market economic systems in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union involves fundamental shifts in the sectoral allocation of resources, in particular, dramatic changes in employment structures. Development of services in Russia turns to be more impressive than in many other transitional countries. This paper uses the Baumol-Fuchs model of the service sector expansion to estimate underdevelopment of services in Russia prior the transition and measure the progress in catching-up that has taken place thus far. Based on the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (1994-2000) empirical analysis demonstrates that sectoral variation in the difference between withdrawal from and entrance to the labor force is the main reason of changing distribution of labor. For job-to-job transitions low quality of current job matches, tenure effects and labor market segmentation are the most important explanation of inter-sectoral labor mobility.
Using two rounds of nationally representative household survey data in this study, we measure the impact on poverty in Nepal of local and international migration for work. We apply an instrumental variables approach to deal with nonrandom selection of migrants and simulate various scenarios for the different levels of migration comparing observed and counterfactual household expenditure distribution. Our results indicate that one-fifth of the poverty reduction in Nepal occurring between 1995 and 2004 can be attributed to higher levels of work-related migration and remittances sent home. We also show that while the increase in international work-related migration was the leading cause of this poverty reduction, domestic migration also played an important role. Our findings demonstrate that strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction in Nepal should consider aspects of the dynamics of domestic and international migration.
Smoking is a problem, bringing signifi cant social and economic costs to Russiansociety. However, ratifi cation of the World health organization Framework conventionon tobacco control makes it possible to improve Russian legislation accordingto the international standards. So, I describe some measures that should be taken bythe Russian authorities in the nearest future, and I examine their effi ciency. By studyingthe international evidence I analyze the impact of the smoke-free areas, advertisementand sponsorship bans, tax increases, etc. on the prevalence of smoking, cigaretteconsumption and some other indicators. I also investigate the obstacles confrontingthe Russian authorities when they introduce new policy measures and the public attitudetowards these measures. I conclude that there is a number of easy-to-implementanti-smoking activities that need no fi nancial resources but only a political will.