Regional Formation and Development Studies

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.

Unemployment stands out as a major concern of policy makers, particularly in the case of youth unemployment. We intend to depict the reality of youth unemployment among university graduates in the Guar Municipality, as well as ascertain the possible causes and consequences of the phenomenon. We also aim to give some recommendations for decisions makers, so that these young people would take up residence in this region, which suffers from aging and depopulation issues. The main respondents of a questionnaire reported that it is not easy to get a job in a depressed area, i.e., the Guar Municipality, because labour supply has been reduced due to the closure of industries and companies in traditional sectors and to the lack of incentives for people and companies to take up residence in the area.