Ladies and gentlemen,
We are meeting today to discuss the labour market. This is not our first meeting on this issue. The main goal of today's meeting is to consider labour conditions in the country, specifically including the Urals Federal District, and to discuss the tasks yet to be resolved as part of the regional programmes that include extra measures for easing tension on regional labour markets in 2010.
First I would like to lay out the labour problems in the Urals Federal District.
The total number of unemployed in Russia has been growing since October 2009, and stood at 6.8 million in January (according to the latest data presented by the Federal Service for State Statistics), which is 9.2% of the economically active population. The Urals Federal District has a lower level of the total unemployment: 8.5%, or 565,000. The lowest figure was registered in the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area (5.6%) and the highest in the Kurgan Region.
From the beginning of the year through February 24, the number of unemployed registered with employment services increased by 155,000. However, over the past week it fell by nearly 2,700 and now stands at 2.283 million people.
In 2009 the number of unemployed in the Urals Federal District grew to 3% from 1.6% of the country's workforce (except for the Tyumen Region, where the number of jobless fell a bit).
In early March the number of jobless registered with employment services in the Urals Federal District stood at 210,600. The situation is most difficult in the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk Regions, which have 94,800 and 68,800 jobless people respectively.
The total number of people employed part-time, workers who stood idle because of their employers' inactivity or who were given an unpaid leave has recently stabilised at over 1.6 million across the whole country. Importantly, one-third of these people live in the Urals Federal District, including 344,500 people in the Chelyabinsk Region.
The ratio of tension in the Urals Federal District labour market is rather high (5.1 against 3.2 across the whole country).
Ladies and gentlemen,
The regional programmes that include measures to improve the regional labour markets in 2009 had a positive effect, including those administered in the Urals Federal District.
The government transferred 3.7 billion roubles in allocations to the constituent entities included in the Urals Federal District.
Public works and preventive occupational re-training for employees were the most popular and effective projects implemented in the Urals Federal District in 2009. This was caused by the structure of the district's economy, which has the largest production complex and includes Russia's largest metallurgic, machine building, chemical and ore mining plants.
The implementation of regional projects continues through 2010, which required 36.3 billion roubles to be transferred from the regional budget.
The programs included in the Urals Federal District's regional programmes will receive 3.8 billion roubles in 2010, 3.4 billion roubles from the federal budget and 411 million roubles from the regional budgets. A total of 141,300 people will take part in these regional programmes.
The government financed the first stage of the regional projects (40% of the total amount of the allocations for 78 constituent entities ) at a total of 12.9 billion roubles, including over a billion roubles from the federal budget sent to the Urals Federal District.
We should take into account that the structure of activities and the number of participants in regional programmes in the Urals Federal District improved in 2010. So the number of people working in public and temporary jobs decreased to 70% from 89%, and the number of employees taking preventive occupational re-training increased to 12% from 7%. The number of unemployed who started their own businesses increased to 9% from 3.5%, and the number of those forced to move to get a new job increased to 6% from 0.4%.
The programme to assist disabled people with employment will be used by 2,266 people.
However, all of these achievements should not make us complacent. We should keep in mind that the Urals Federal District lags behind other Russian regions in terms of the main labour market parameters. Though, to be fair, I should say here that the labour market in the Tyumen Region and in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area-Yugra looks better than the labour markets of other constituent entities included in the Urals Federal District.
Here is another issue worth discussing thoroughly. The Urals Federal District's 2010 regional programmes contain the analysis of the labour market of single-industry municipal communities and programmes for the employees of township-forming enterprises that are in a difficult financial situation, as well as other measures to ease the tension on the labour market of single-industry communities.
I would like to remind you that five of the 27 major single-industry communities to be modernized on a first priority basis in 2010 are located in the Urals Federal District, including the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk Regions.