The number of the unemployed and those claiming benefit drops for the first time since the start of the economic crisis in Russia.
Registered unemployment dropped for the first time since monitoring began (in October 2008) in the last week of April by 0.7% to 2,268,000, a spokesman for the Ministry of Healthcare and Social Development announced yesterday. Just last week Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the weekly growth of unemployment had slowed down from 9% in January-February to 1.6% in March-April.
Registered unemployment has dropped in the Jewish Autonomous Region, Tyva, Astrakhan and Sakhalin regions, but has continued to grow in some major regions, including the Irkutsk and Nizhny Novgorod regions, Moscow and St Petersburg.
This is a seasonal drop, says Vladimir Gimpelson, director of the Labour Research Centre at the Higher School of Economics: there is an inflow of workers in agriculture, retailing and private house construction. Increased financing of unemployment benefits, support of internal migration and self-employment and other measures (the 2009 budget earmarks 120.5 billion roubles for that purpose) will have no long-term effect, Mr Gimpelson is sure. He says unemployment may grow in May. According to the Ministry of Healthcare and Social Development, 1,978 organisations have announced plans to lay off people between April 22 and 29 alone.
Rosstat has not yet published unemployment figures for April. Earlier it predicted that by the beginning of April unemployment across Russia would reach 10% of the economically active population (7.5 million people). In 38 (out of 83) regions more than 10% of people were out of work by mid-February. The highest level of unemployment is in Ingushetia (55.3%), Chechnya (30.3%), Buryatia (26.1%), the Kurgan Region (25.3%) and North Ossetia (22%).
At the end of April the head of Rostrud, Yuri Gertsy, said that by the end of the year Russia would have 2.6 million registered unemployed (3.5% of economically active population). The Minister of Healthcare and Social Development, Tatyana Golikova, said the figure would not exceed 2.8 million (3.7%) and the overall unemployment would be 7.8 million (10.4%).