Individual Determinants of Employment in Russia: Regional and Industrial Peculiarities

In the article the impact of individual characteristics of employees on the probability of being employed in the regions of Russia with similar industrial structure of economy and employment was estimated. The model of local labor markets was used as the basic theoretical model of the work. It predicts that workers with different productivity are distributed unequally across the territory of a country. Based on this theory, the hypothesis of the research suggests that in regions with different sectoral employment structures the same individual characteristics of workers have different effects on the probability of their employment. For the purposes of the analysis the regions were grouped according to the characteristics of the industrial structure of the regional economy and employment. In particular we divided extractive, manufacturing, agricultural groups of regions and the labour markets of big cities. The analysis was carried out on the basis of Rosstat's regional microdata for 2015, containing more than 830 thousand observations. Estimates of the probabilities of being employed were carried out on the basis of binary logit models. The results showed that in the Russian regions with a similar industrial economic structure, similar individual characteristics of employees increase the probability of being employed. The fact of living in the largest cities of the country as well as in the extractive regions increases the probability of being employed. The greatest marginal coefficients for all regions were obtained for age and vocational education, but their values vary with the group. The most educated employees are concentrated in the competitive labour markets of large cities and their agglomerations, which also impose stricter requirements on workers in terms of age, sex and children. The youngest workers with a larger share of the male population and a lower level of education live in the extractive regions. At the same time, the probability of being employed in the extractive regions compared to other groups of regions is higher for women and employees with higher education and individuals with children under the age of 18. Higher education increases the chances of being employed for the population of agricultural regions, although in general the economic activity of the population in this regions is the lowest among all the groups of regions, and the unemployment rate is the highest. Thus, despite the low territorial and sectoral mobility of workers which is typical for Russia, the country still has a concentration of employees with similar individual characteristics in regions with a close economic and employment structure.

Keywords

Authors

References