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Original Articles

The Civilian Labour Force and Unemployment in the Russian Federation

Pages 1433-1447 | Published online: 02 Jul 2010

References

  • Kuboniwa , Masaaki and Gavrilenkov , Evgeny . 1997 . Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Second Challenge , Maruzen : Tokyo . Table 2.1, p. 26. Cf
  • 1999 . 'UNDP Report Exposes Transition's Dark Side--The Rise in Poverty, Crime, Disease and Mortality' . Transition , 10 ( 4 ) August : 19 – 22 . United Nations, Human Development Report for Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, 1999; and
  • Gaddy , Charles and Ickes , Barry . 1998 . 'Russia's Virtual Economy' . Foreign Affairs , September/October For a discussion of the rationale for some prior adjustments intended to present Russia's transitionary economic performance more favourably than Goskomstat' s initial series see Kuboniwa & Gavrilenkov, Development of Capitalism in Russia. Cf.
  • Ermath , Fritz . 1999 . 'Seeing Russia Plain' . National Interest , Spring : 5 – 14 .
  • Stiglitz , Joseph . 1999 . 'Whither Reform? Ten Years of Transition' . Keynote Address, Annual World Bank, Conference on Development Economics . April 28-30 1999 .
  • Beattie , Alan . 1999 . 'Economist Rebuked over View on Russia' . Financial Times , 22 September : 2 'Sick Patients, Warring Doctors', The Economist, 18-24 September 1999, p. 81; Guy Standing, Russian Unemployment and Enterprise Restructuring (International Labour Organisation and St Martin's Press, New York, 1996)
  • United Nations Development Program . 1998 . Human Development Report 1998 , New York : Oxford University Press . Table 41, p. 200. Rapawy's forecast predicts 8.3 million missing persons from the civilian labour force in 1998. Approximately half the 1.8 million population shortfall is attributable to those outside the work force, and their share of the population decline is 0.9 million, 11% of the unexplained civilian labour force deficit
  • Heleniak , Timothy . 1997 . 'Internal Migration in Russia During the Economic Transition' . Post-Soviet Geography and Economics , 38 ( 2 ) : 81 104 W. Wade Kingkade, 'Demographic Prospects in the Republics of the Former Soviet Union', in The Former Soviet Union in Transition, Vol. 2, Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, May 1993, p. 809;
  • Heleniak , Timothy . 1999 . 'Out-Migration and Depopulation of the Russian North during the 1990s' . Post-Soviet Geography and Economics , 40 ( 3 ) : 155 – 205 . Migration affects not only the totals but the age-sex composition. See Table A8. Published migration data do not illuminate this further complexity
  • Stephen , Rapawy . 'Labor Force and Employment in the U.S.S.R.' . Gorbachey' s Economic Plans , 1 Rapawy estimated the working age cohort in the year 2000 at 88% of the labour force. The fraction 0.12 is used to estimate the 9.0 million above working age job seekers in 1990 referred to in the text. Kingkade estimated a 63 000 person cumulative decline in the Russian Federation' s working age population 1991-95, implying that the 1.5 million increase in the civilian labour force during this period derived from Rapawy's Soviet series may be entirely attributable to over-age workers (or net migration). The estimated working age change 1996-2000 is 2 million, which pro-rated to 1998 suggests the possibility that 1.2 million people might have withdrawn from the 1998 civilian labour force based on Rapawy's forecasts. Since the 'working age population' was defined by Soviet authorities to exclude dependents, students and the physically or mentally incapacitated, no further adjustment is necessary. See
  • Joint Economic Committee Congress of the United States, Washington, DC, 23 November 1987, pp. 188; Kingkade, 'Demographic Trends in the Soviet Union' in Gorbachev' s Economic Plans, Vol. 1, Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 23 November 1987, Table 2 and Table 4, pp. 173 and 175. Cf. Table A6 and Kingkade, 'Demographic Prospects in the Republics of the Former Soviet Union', Figure 4, p. 815.
  • Rosefielde , Steven . 1987 . Underestimating the Soviet Arms Buildup, , Second edition Transaction Press Rapawy reports that there were 16 million workers in the machine building and metalworking sectors in 1985, which should have been enough to encompass the 10 million military machine building employees estimated by Western intelligence. See Rapawy, 'Labor Force and Employment in the U.S.S.R.', p. 200. The precedents for inclusion and exclusion are contradictory. The Soviet defence budget, as we now know, excluded weapons, but military hardware based on William T. Lee calculations were included in the ruble statistics on MBMW. A full discussion of this complicated issue is beyond the scope of the present article. See
  • Rosefielde , Steven . 1989 . 'Soviet Defense Spending: The Contribution of the New Accountancy' . Soviet Studies , 41 October : 3
  • Lee , William T. 1977 . The Estimation of Soviet Defense Expenditures for 1955-1975 Praeger Igor Birman, 'Velichina Sovetskikh voennykh raskhodov: metodicheskii aspekt', 1990, reports that 4 million workers in the Soviet nuclear weapons sector plus space based mirrors for laser warfare were excluded from Goskomstat's MBMW statistics. The figure was confirmed by Emil Ershov, when he was a statistical chief at Goskomstat
  • Lee , William . 1995 . CIA Estimates of Soviet Military Expenditures, Errors and Waste , 151 Washington : AEI . note 25
  • Stephen, Rapawy, 'Labor Force and Employment in the U.S.S.R.', in Gorbachev' s Economic Plans, Vol. 1, Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Washington, DC, 23 November 1987, Table 1, pp. 194-195, Table 5, pp. 202-203 and 187-198. For further details see Stephen Rapawy & W. Ward Kingkade, Estimates and Projections of the Labor Force and Civilian Employment in the U.S.S.R.: 1950 to 2000, US Bureau of the Census, Center for International Research, CIR Staff Paper, No. 45, Washington D.C., September 1988;
  • 1978 . Tsentral'noe statisticheskoe upravlenie (TsSU) pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, Vsesoyuznaya perepis' naseleniya-vse-narodnoe delo , Moscow : Statistika . Tsentral' noe statisticheskoe upravlenie (TsSU) pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, Itogi Vsesoyuznoi perepisi naseleniya 1970 goda, Vol. IV, (Moscow, Statistika 1973)
  • Feshbach , Murray . 1972 . “ 'Soviet Industrial Productivity Statistics' ” . In Soviet Economic Statistics , Edited by: Treml , Vladimir and Hardt , John . 197 – 201 . Durham , NC : Duke University Press .
  • 1991 . Narodnoe khozyaistvo SSSR 1990 97 Moscow This unemployment is taken into account in later estimates of people missing from the civilian labour force
  • Keynes , John Maynard . 1953 . The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money , New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich . Steven Rosefielde, Principles of Comparative Economic Systems: Foundations of Wealth and Great Power in the 21st Century, Chapter 2, 'Micro and Macro Foundations of Modern Economic Systems', (Blackwell, forthcoming 2001)
  • United Nations Development Program . 1998 . Human Development Report 1998 , New York : Oxford University Press . Standard labour force statistics use the current survey estimate rather than the Keynesian generally competitive level, tacitly assuming that they are similar. The Keynesian generally competitive civilian labour force, however, is used separately to measure 'discouraged workers'. See
  • Rosefielde , Steven . 1998 . Efficiency and Russia's Economic Recovery Potential to the Year 2000 and Beyond, Chapter 1 3 – 10 . Ashgate Table 33, p. 192. The Russian economy of course is not and never was generally competitive. It is conceivable that, if Russia's markets became efficient today, the full employment civilian labour force ideal would be less than the 74.6 million employed in 1990 because the effect of increased real wages on labour supply would be countervailed by a leisure-facilitating wealth effect, but this is implausible for a mis-developed country like Russia where people aspire to Western living standards. For a discussion of disequilibrium potential see
  • United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, Economic Survey of Europe, 1999, 1 New York 1999, Chart 3.5.4, p. 135.
  • Kingkade's fertility adjustments indicates that the birth deficit component of the 6.1 million excess deaths is 2.7 million. See Steven Rosefielde, 'Negligent Homicide: Russia's Post-Soviet Transition in Communist Perspective', paper presented at the 32nd AAASS Convention, Denver, November, 10, 2000.
  • Gavrilenkov , Evgeny . 1999 . 'Permanent Crisis in Russia: Selected Problems of Macroeconomic Performance' . Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics , 40 : 41 – 57 .
  • United Nations, Economic Commission for Europe, Economic Survey, 1999, 2, Box 2.3.1, p. 43. Cf. Simon Commander & Andrei Tolstopiatenko, 'Unemployment, Restructuring and the Pace of Transition', in Salvatore Zecchini (ed.), Lessons From The Economic Transition: Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s (Dordrecht and Boston, OECD and Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 331-350;
  • Commander , S. and Coricelli , F. 1995 . Unemployment and Restructuring in Eastern Europe and Russia , Washington, DC : World Bank . The unemployment rate for 1998 reported elsewhere in the text is 13.3%. This latter rate was used for subsequent calculations because the 14.2% figure is based on a new method that has not been applied to recalculate prior years
  • Rapawy's labour force estimates pertain to the Soviet Union. The Russian Federation' s civilian labour force can be crudely estimated proportionally with its population share in 1990, 50.6%. The figure is 77.0 million, 2.4 million above the Goskomstat estimate reported by the United Nations. The calculations performed in this article refer to the Goskomstat series, unless otherwise stated. See W. Ward Kingkade, 'Demographic Trends in the Soviet Union', in Gorbachev' s Economic Plans, Vol. 1, Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, Washington, DC, 23 November 1987, 194-195, Table 2, p. 173. If the US Census Bureau's definition of the civilian labour force were used instead presumably the number of missing job seekers would be greater in absolute terms because the civilian labour force base is larger.

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