MOSCOW, February 4. /TASS/. Ukraine is experiencing a labor shortage of more than three million workers, but unemployed Ukrainians are reluctant to fill the vacancies, a Ukrainian expert said.
According to Doctor of Economics Andrey Dligach, some two million officially unemployed Ukrainians are not actively looking for work or looking to improve their skills, instead expecting "business to come to them." However, this is unlikely to happen, so "it will be necessary to bring in people from Bangladesh, India, Africa, and the Middle East to do the work in the coming five to seven years," he said in an interview with Novosti. Live.
Another problem, in his words, is that "80% of companies in Ukraine cannot exempt their workers from army service." "We cannot shield ourselves from economic downturn, so this whole system needs to be revised," he explained. "We need to take a closer look at the logic behind granting exemptions, army rotation, demobilization, and what is most important, how to make effective use of limited human capital."
Ukraine’s National Bank said in its annual inflation report in late January that nearly half a million people had left Ukraine in 2024, and the population’s exodus from the country was expected to continue this year.
Many employment-age Ukrainians are trying to leave the country by any means possible, fearing mobilization. According to public polls, many of those who leave find jobs abroad and do not plan to return to the country. At the same time, almost all sectors of the Ukrainian economy report a shortage of workers. According to experts of the Ukrainian Razumkov Center for Economic and Political Research, by the summer of 2024, the number of able-bodied people in the country had decreased by 40% compared to 2021. According to the press service of the Geneva-based UN headquarters for the fall of 2024, the population of Ukraine had decreased by eight million people since February 2022.