Dynamics of demand in the labor market in the southern regions of Russia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

The events taking place in 2020 in the world in general and in Russia in particular have dramatically shaken up all spheres of public life. The quarantine measures have significantly blocked the channels of business interaction and enabled a pause mode in a wide range of economic processes. The state of the labor market during the crisis period is a defining indicator that demonstrates the strategies of employers and employees. This article studies the dynamics of a key indicator of the labor market — the demand for labor in the southern regions of Russia. The author aims to analyze the dynamics of labor market demand in a number of cities in southern regions of Russia in the key periods of spring 2020 events associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis covers six cities of southern Russia, located in different regions and significantly different specific structure of the economic sphere. The indicators of the southern regions as a whole were considered separately, which allowed to diagnose their condition and draw conclusions about ther particular “painful” dependencies. The labor market of the southern Russian cities is characterized by stable seasonality structures and highly specialized orientation in a number of territories. These private characteristics have a direct impact on complex economic indicators. The eployment of quarantine measures on the eve of the holiday season and preventive saturation with epidemiological security measures of the tourist business in the country threatened to turn into an economic disaster for a number of territories. The novelty of this topic lies in the fact that the forced lockdown had an external character and it highlighted a significant dependence of economic actions of business on the decisions of the authorities. The new conditions of destabilization were a test of stability of organizational links of different spheres of public life. An essential factor that destabilized the behavior of key labor market participants was the mass media, which spread false or unverified information. The author draws a conclusion about the characteristic avalanche-like declines and rises in demand in the labor market of the southern regions and about the uneven distribution of reactions in different cities with similar geographical locations.