Home – Home – Jornals – Region: Economics and Sociology 2022 number 3

The impact on labor markets of measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 almost immediately became the subject of increased attention to researchers across the globe. Already in mid-2020, analytical materials emerged estimating the magnitude and consequences of pandemic shocks at both the national and subnational levels. In this paper we propose that the shocks that labor markets responded to in 2020 should include not only restrictive measures to curb the spread of COVID-19 but also shocks of independent significance to the fall of several commodity markets. The purpose of the article is to characterize the reactions of the labor markets in Russian resource-type regions to the crisis of2020. We used Rosstat data as empirical basis to present regional labor markets by months/quarters of2020 as compared with the corresponding period in 2019. This study confirms that the Russian labor market has responded with traditional adjustment mechanisms, primarily flexible working hours. Their regulation by the state, on the one hand, helped curb the decline in employment and the growth of ILO unemployment rate, while, on the other hand, registered unemployment rose. At the same time, regional labor markets reacted differently to the 2020 shocks. This was due to the different impact of various recession factors, as well as to the different impact of institutional changes in the regulation of employment. The study revealed differences in the response to the 2020 shocks in the labor markets of resource-type regions with different degrees of resource dependence.