Reshetnikov called abnormally low unemployment a brake on the economy

Economic Development Minister Maksim Reshetnikov said the low unemployment rate was anomalous. According to him, this slows down the country’s economy, the main problem of which today is the shortage of personnel. According to Rosstat, in July, unemployment again updated a record low – up to 3%.

“The main problem is the human resource. This is also reflected in the extremely low unemployment rate: 3% is still abnormal for us. This is definitely a brake on the development of the economy, and not some kind of plus. This is reflected in the outstripping growth of wages,” Maxim Reshetnikov said at the plenary session of the Forum for Social Innovations of the Regions.

The minister noted that such an indicator would be quite good if there were no shortage of personnel and specialists in Russia. “It is difficult to argue with the fact that human capital, human resource has become the scarcest resource in the economy. Not investments, not finances, and not even technologies that are difficult to deal with,” Maxim Reshetnikov believes. The problem of shortage of personnel, according to him, is both quantitative and qualitative.

To solve the problem of staff shortages, the minister proposed expanding the national project to increase labor productivity and more actively attract migrants to the economy. “We will have to solve the migration issue. We are located in the Eurasian Economic Space, we have an open labor market. And, of course, the challenges of the last year and a half indicate that there is a large outflow of the population,” the minister explained.

Maxim Reshetnikov drew attention to the fact that Central Asia is an actively growing region with a lot of workers. He noted that Russia competes for labor from Central Asia with China, Southeast Asia and other countries. “We are now actively investing in Russian schools there. But all this needs to be turned into a conscious policy to keep the best talents from neighboring countries here, because these workers are effective, the economy needs them, ”he added.

By data Bank of Russia, since the beginning of 2023, the industry has had the lowest staffing over the past 25 years. By data Rostrud, in early August, 1.9 million vacancies were opened on the Jobs in Russia portal, but they closed very slowly.

Anastasia Larina