The research included a large-scale survey of the adult members of 4,000 households in four Russian cities in 1998, and case studies of forty new private enterprises and labour market intermediaries. The new private sector has grown rapidly since 1995 and now provides regular employment for between 15 and 25 percent of the population in larger cities. However, most new private enterprises are small and unstable. Firms pay higher wages but provide fewer social and welfare benefits and employment is less secure and stable. Illegal employment and accounting practices are common, particularly among smaller businesses.
Employers prefer to hire young, well-educated men with some work experience.
Hiring is predominantly through personal connections so that it is very difficult find work without them. Labour and employment policies could help break down the segmentation of the labour market that leads to the persistence of extremely low wages. Views expressed on these pages are not necessarily those of DFID, IDS, id21 or other contributing institutions. All rights reserved.