Assessment of COVID Crisis Impact on the Unemployment Rate in Post-Soviet Countries

Abstract

The market economy is characterized by the presence of unemployment, which performs a number of functions: it carries out the transfer of workers from one industry to another, stimulates workers to high labor productivity and continuous professional development. In addition, unemployment is an indicator of the state of the economic system, so in times of crisis the indicator level increases sharply, while in a successfully developing economy it tends to zero. Hence, it is of practical interest to assess the crisis phenomena on the unemployment rate in post-Soviet countries. Thus, the purpose of this article is to quantify the impact of the COVID crisis on the unemployment rate in post-Soviet countries. To achieve this goal, we used such methods of scientific cognition as historical, comparative and mathematical-statistical. The conducted research allows drawing a number of important conclusions: despite the objective similarity of the causes of crises, the prevailing economic models in post-Soviet countries react differently to the shock effect, which is manifested in the increase in the variation of the unemployment rate in the republics under consideration as they move away from the beginning of market transformations; the influence of the economic situation on the unemployment rate (Oaken’s law) in post-Soviet countries are not the same in different crisis situations, this is indicated by the difference in the spread of points in 2008–2009 and 2020; the assessment of the level of convergence of the economic systems of post-Soviet countries in terms of GDP per capita and unemployment for the period 1991–2021, based on the Euclidean distance, leads to the conclusion that the economies diverge significantly over time, while at the moment, countries such as Kazakhstan and Belarus are closest to the indicators of Russia.