Labor Market Adjustment : Is Russia Different?

The paper discusses how the Russian labor market has been evolving over two decades of the transition. It starts with tracing key labor market indicators such as employment, unemployment, labor force participation, working hours, and real wages. Their dynamics indicate that the labor market tends to operate in a non-conventional fashion and far from the patterns expected initially. The authors argue that the current Russian labor market represents a peculiar model that is different from what is observed in the rest of Europe outside of the CIS. Having established this, they look at the institutional foundations that make this unconventional performance possible and proceed with discussing political economy and welfare implications. The findings are compared with the experience of other post-socialist countries