Russia Doesn’t Have a Shortage of People: It has a Shortage of Skilled Positions and People Trained for Them, Krupnov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 4 – Russia does not have a shortage of people as most of the discussions of migration and the need to boost the birthrate assume but rather a shortage of jobs that require high levels of skill and sufficient personnel with the training to fill them, according to Moscow demographer Yury Krupnov.
    In short, the senior scholar at the Moscow Institute of Demography, Migration and Regional Development says, Russia like much of the Soviet economy before it has a Third World kind of economy in which many are employed in make work jobs because they lack skills and thus can’t earn the money needed to a middle class life (svpressa.ru/society/article/445006/).
    Only about a third of Russia’s 75 million jobs require high levels of skill and get the pay that such jobs bring. Two-thirds are jobs that are basically unskilled and could easily be done away with, Krupnov says. For example, the millions of unskilled who guard the displays or elevators in department stores.
    Moreover, the demographer continues, “compared to Soviet times, the number of officials per 1,000 people has doubled,” a number that isn’t justified by the skills or training such people have and that holds the economy down and leads the occupants of these positions to assume they need more immigrants and babies to justify their positions.
    According to Krupnov, Russia’s “shortage of personnel is not the result of a lack of people but rather of the lack of promising areas of employment,” where those who occupy these jobs are highly skilled and well paid and thus in a position to live “decently” rather than scraping by.
    Moreover, he continues, “to put it simply, we do not have a shortage of personnel but a shortage of jobs which in the terminology of the International Labor Organization provide decent work.” Russia has too few such jobs and thus remains mired in a Third World kind of economy. Moving to a modern one is what the country should be focusing on.
Of course, Russia needs an adequate migration policy and an adequate demographic policy; but talk about getting more people alone which is what the discussions about these two have been reduced to prevents Moscow from addressing the problem of creating real jobs and training people to fill them.