Unemployment and migration : in-depth study on policy, features, challenges

Abstract

In the light of unstable political developments in the country, harsh socioeconomic conditions and high unemployment rate, Armenians continually leave the country mostly for economic reasons to seek employment opportunities abroad to sustain their families. Hence, the migration process is activating, bringing with it changes in the labor force structure, age-sex composition of population. In much of the theoretical work relating to the explanation of the initiation and perpetuation of contemporary international migration, pre-eminence is given to the primacy of market forces and social networks (Massey et al.1993)[10]. It is often overloocked that Governments can and do intervene to shape the extent to which potential migrants with particular characteristics are permitted to enter or leave a country and the nature of their experience at the destination. Government of the Republic of Armenia is going to become a crucial player influencing the scale, direction and composition of population movement, develop policies and programs related to migration and settlement, assuming it of much importance politically, economically, socially and demographically. Since Armenia is now in the stage of transition, changes occur in labor demand patterns driven by changes in economic structure. For instance, demand for production related workers is insignificant due to termination of many factories. At the same time demand for service related activities is rising from day to day. So, it is very important to have skills which match the newly established economic activities. For a lot of workers this implies that they have to acquire new skills (or they are at risk to become long-term unemployed), adjust to other working methods, which imply additional expenses on skill conversion. Another problem is that the official demographic estimations (both volume and structural and relative estimations) are conditional in the whole, since there is no exact figure on population size, which actually excludes the possibility to receive main objective picture of neither demographic, nor social and economic situations. The number of officially registered unemployed people in the beginning of 2000 was 11.6%.[5](graph 1) The official number misses several categories of workers including discouraged workers and hidden unemployment (informal sector), visible ”under-employment”*. [p.29] Also, school leavers and individuals who have been employed for less than one year are not counted as an unemployed. The Employment service can also dismiss people, according to 71 P decree, when the unemployed do not come once per month for inadequate reason (he or she can be taken off the status of unemployed). [8] Thereafter, “real” unemployment figures are much higher than “official” ones. The same situation exists within migration process, where the actual scope is much greater. One of the major objectives of the present paper is to review and assess Government’s attempts to shape the extent, character and direction of labor exports. Another objective is to clear up a question why the particular target group of unemployed people behaves in such a mode that some of them are registered with State Employment Service, what kind of problems do they face. Since there is no trust on figures and because of persistent nature of the proposed problems, qualitative research methods were employed such as an observation, interviewing responsible officials and “direct victims” unemployed, focus group, analyzing of existed information. The study revealed some differences between two types of Services, drawbacks of those services, and made evident direct connection between unemployment and migration. All today’s problems in the labor market namely mismatch of supply and demand, high youth unemployment rate, long duration of unemployment, labor migration, passive labor policy are associated with poorly organized management of the present system.