Raising the retirement age has added few workers – Kommersant

The increase in the retirement age, launched in the Russian Federation in 2019, had little effect on the size of the labor force and the number of people employed in the Russian labor market. Rostislav Kapelyushnikov, Deputy Head of the Center for Labor Research at the Higher School of Economics, came to this conclusion in the study “The Russian Labor Market: A Statistical Portrait Against the Background of Crises”. Recall that the pension reform of the Russian Federation involves a gradual increase in the retirement age from 55 to 60 years for women and from 60 to 65 years for men. One of its main goals was to increase the size of the workforce.

As the study showed, in general, the dynamics of the working-age population in 2020-2022 did change. The annual decline in the indicator by 0.5-1 million people was replaced by an increase of 400 thousand, 1.2 million and 0.7 million people, respectively. The contribution of changing the boundaries of the retirement age (there are other factors) can be estimated at 1.2 million people for 2020 (the working-age population was 82.1 million people) and 2.7 million for 2021 (83.4 million).

However, as Rostislav Kapelyushnikov calculated, another more significant indicator in this case – the number of the economically active population (the actual labor force) – has changed insignificantly over the years. The reason is that pensioners aged 55-56 among women and 60-61 among men before the changes in pension legislation had fairly high labor force participation rates, that is, they worked in a significant number of cases. Thus, the peak of the labor force in the labor market was recorded in 2011 (75.8 million people), after several years of stability in 2017-2018, the figure decreased by 0.5 million people, and in 2019-2022 it decreased by another 1 .3 million to the level of 2005 (73.6 million people).

Comparing the labor force participation rates of women aged 55-56 and men aged 60-61 for 2018, 2020 and 2021, the author of the study found that they increased by 10-15 percentage points – this provided an increase in the economically active population only by 200 thousand people in 2020 and by 500 thousand in 2021. However, even such a modest increase was offset by “negative effects associated with the demographic hole into which the Russian economy was gradually sinking,” the author of the work notes.

Anastasia Manuylova