Youth Unemployment in Russia: Models of Interregional Differentiation

Abstract

The paper presents a statistical assessment of interregional differences in youth unemployment in Russia. The unemployment rate was decomposed into fundamental and cyclical components, which was essential for deeper understanding of the specificity of the youth labour market. We made a typology of the regions of RF according to similar trends of youth unemployment and an empirical analysis of the rates, dynamics and factors of unemployment among the young people aged 15–19 and 20–29 years for 77 regions of Russia between 2005 and 2013. We also analyzed the response of the regional rates of youth unemployment to crises. For analyzing the regional parameters of youth unemployment, we employed economical-statistical methods. We identified the interregional differences in the youth labor market and the nature of their changes in the time of economic crisis. The statistical database for this study was the Rosstat data posted on the official website of the Federal State Statistics Service. We found that in the time of crisis the interregional differences in unemployment rates decreased and in the period of recovery growth, they increased. The interregional differentiation was on the rise because some individual regions used new points of growth. The study was conducted at the Institute of Agrarian Problems of RAS with the financial support from the Russian Scientific Foundation (RSF), project # 14-18-02801.