The paper discusses how the russian labor market has been evolving over two decades of the transition. it starts with tracing key labor market indicators such as employment, unemployment, labor force participation, working hours, and real wages. Their dynamics indicate that the labor market tends to operate in a non-conventional fashion and far from the patterns expected initially. The authors argue that the current russian labor market represents a peculiar model that is different from what is observed in the rest of europe outside of the cis. having established this, they look at the institutional foundations that make this unconventional performance possible and proceed with discussing political economy and welfare implications. The findings are compared with the experience of other post-socialist countries.
The paper comments on new estimates of EPL stringency for Russia which implies that labor regulation in Russia is de jure very flexible. Alternative estimates presented in the paper suggest that by stringency of EPL Russia exceeds even those OECD countries whose labor markets are considered overtly overregulated.
The paper attempts to estimate expropriation risks for shareholders in the Russian economy. On the basis of the survey of nearly 1000 manufacturing firms which was conducted in 2009 a series of special «ownership insecurity indices» is constructed and their variation by types of risks and firms is analyzed. Using various econometric techniques the study examines major determinants of ownership insecurity and evaluates its impact on firms investment and innovative activity. The analysis shows that the Russian economy continues to operate on a shaky basis of attenuated and insecure property rights and that under such condition incentives for economic agents to invest in any long-term projects turn out to be inevitably weak.
The paper examines dynamics in demand and supply of skilled labor in the russian economy over the transition period of 1990–2000-s. It shows that despite a huge inflow of workers with tertiary education demand for such workers grew in the russian labor market even faster. This explains why unemployment for workers with high educational attainment remained low; why returns to education continued to be high; why a proportion of college graduates who occupied low-skilled jobs decreased rather than increased. However in the next decades a relationship between demand and supply might radically change so that the russian economy could face with massive oversupply of highly educated workforce.