Informal employment in Siberian villages

The decade of agrarian reforms in the post-Soviet Russia has failed to develop an efficient multilayered structure of the agricultural sector and has also led to the deterioration of living standards of most agrarian workers. The paper describes two seemingly paradoxical consequences of the reforms: first, workers retained formal employment in inefficient agricultural firms despite not receiving monetary remuneration for work, and second, a rapid production growth at personal subsidiary plots turned individual households into main producers of agricultural products.[Full text of the article is in Russian language only.]Building upon surveys in the Novosibirsk region in 1998- 2000, the paper asserts that the paradoxes can be explained by development of informal employment relations in rural areas as a way of adaptation to crisis situations.The paper describes how the formal and informal employment sectors interact by singling out three models:parasitic symbiosis, in which the management of a weakly controlled inefficient enterprise tolerates and overlooks stealing of “unneeded” goods and equipment by workersparity symbiosis, in which households and an enterprise have some sort of (not necessarily formalised and monetary) contract relations, and each specialise in an activity according to their comparative advantagea “new corporate” model, in which an agricultural firm has acquired a new effective owner and is able to pay its workersThe first model helps to explain the first paradox described above: the efficiency of a worker’s informal employment in the household depends on the access to enterprise resources and thus, on the formal employment at the enterprise. However, when such an enterprise finally goes bankrupt, production at a personal subsidiary plot becomes the only income and necessitates a move to the informal employment sector. Symbiosis models explain the growth of individual households’ share in agricultural production. If a situation develops according the third model, work at personal subsidiary plots becomes supplemental to the formal employment.The paper concludes by looking at two scenarios of future development in the agricultural sector:evolutionary development that leads to stratification of households into cost-inefficient and poor, on the one side, and cost / scale- efficient and more affluent, on the other, with the latter eventually becoming employers of poorer householdsenlargement of private farms owing to land leasing from unemployed land plot owners, for whom rent payments serve the basis for household economy development