Russia will face “a deficit of executives” in the coming years, Vladimir Putin admitted on Thursday, after the departure abroad of hundreds of thousands of Russians since the start of the conflict in Ukraine in early 2022.
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“According to experts, Russia will experience a shortage of executives and qualifications in the years to come,” admitted the Russian president in a speech to business representatives.
“And this deficit certainly cannot be filled mechanically, by (…) the importation of low-skilled labor from abroad,” he continued.
The master of the Kremlin stressed that immigration, Moscow’s traditional lever to compensate for its lack of workers, “will not solve the problem”. “We need other approaches,” he urged to Russian industrialists and members of the government.
The Russian leader did not list the sectors affected, but his comments come as Russia faces numerous labor shortages, also among low-skilled jobs, after the departure of hundreds of thousands of Russians to the abroad or on the front since February 2022.
Faced with this problem, the government has already set objectives for implementing training within schools and universities aimed at filling these gaps within the Russian population.
On Thursday, Vladimir Putin also confirmed that the government was working on changing income tax brackets in the country, a reform expected as a socio-economic marker of the start of his fifth term in the Kremlin.
In Russia, income tax is historically set at 13%, despite the implementation in 2021 of a second bracket at 15% for high incomes, in the midst of the Covid pandemic.
An increase in taxes, particularly for the middle class, would aim for the State to increase its tax revenues and thus more easily support its war effort in Ukraine, the explosion in military spending having caused the federal budget to jump.
“The modernization of the tax system should ensure a more equitable distribution of the tax burden,” Vladimir Putin argued on Thursday, estimating that this would “stimulate” investments, in the midst of a reorganization of the national economy.
