L'One of the current problems of the Russian economy, recognized by all senior officials, is the lack of labor. At the end of 2024, more than 80 % of Russian companies declared difficulty recruiting, in a labor market where the unemployment rate fell to its lowest historic level, 2.4 % in March. No sector is spared, including the military-industrial complex in which the Russian state has been invested massively since 2022.
To face, employers offer increasingly attractive wages, fueling inflation. They revise the level of requirement for recruitments, while no indicator makes it possible to improve labor productivity in Russia, which represents just over half of that of the United States, according to a recent Russian study.
The lack of executives, in particular, has worsened with the war in Ukraine: hundreds of thousands of people fight at the front or already count among the dead and the wounded. Up to 1 million people would have left the country to escape the hardening of the regime or the military mobilization.
This demographic impact of war is added to the structural decline of the population since the fall of the USSR. The low birth rate of the 1990s resulted in hollow generations that have few children. According to the Federal Statistics Agency, Rosstat, there were more than 12 million Russians between 15 and 19 years old in 2001, but only 7.8 million in 2024. And the annexation of Crimea and the four Ukrainian regions, integrated into Russian statistics since 2023, does not correct the substantive trend.
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Source: Lemonde