In search of opportunities? The barriers to more efficient internal labor mobility in Ukraine

Abstract

Ukraine's economy lacks dynamism, and this is both the cause and the effect of people not moving across the regions. The rate at which Ukrainians move from one region to another within the country is only half of what would be expected in comparison with other countries. This paper examines the barriers that prevent workers from moving within Ukraine, using information from focus group discussions and expert surveys. It also offers recommendations for creating greater labor mobility in Ukraine through addressing institutional bottlenecks and defines five key areas for improvement, including the population registry system, housing and credit markets, vocational education and training systems, labor market institutions, and the social welfare system. JEL Classification: J61; J68; P25

The Impact of Non-Cognitive Skills and Risk Preferences on Rural-to-Urban Migration: Evidence from Ukraine

“…4 Problems caused by these internal movements, such as, for instance, the dicult labor market integration of newcomers and their limited access to the housing market, pointed to the multiple institutional shortcomings and obstacles that have greatly discouraged internal mobility in the last three decades in Ukraine. In this period, Ukrainians have encountered a number of barriers to internal mobility including a complicated population registry system, weak formal labor market institutions, underdevelopment of housing and credit markets, non-portability of social benets and wide-spread skills mismatch 5 (Koettl et al, 2014). As a result, the population of Ukraine is considerably less geographically mobile than one would expect given the high economic disparities across regions and between rural and urban areas.…”

“…Not surprisingly, Kyiv is the largest magnet for internal labor migrants in the country. At the same time, scholars acknowledge, that internal migration in Ukraine is not always directed from economically lagging to better developed industrial regions but happens mostly within the same region (from rural to urban areas) or between neighboring regions with similar levels of socioeconomic development (Koettl et al, 2014, Kupets, 2014.…”

Assessing and Improving Vocational Teachers’ Education and Training in Ukraine

“…Also, there is a lack of systematic studies on the changes that take place in the labour market in Ukraine despite the fact that a large number of studies devoted to the labour market have already been published (Horbal, Shpak and Shpak, 2016, Koettl et al, 2014, Kupets, 2014Libanova et al, 2014, Lukyanenko and Oliskevych, 2014, Petrova, 2016Petyuh, Shchetinina and Shkoda, 2016). In particular, it relates to researching employers' needs for competencies of graduates from colleges under current economic conditions.…”