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The Russian Ministry of Health and Social Development and the State Statistics Service will assess the real state of things with overall unemployment in the country, Tatyana Golikova, the minister of health and social development, told reporters on Wednesday.
"Jointly with the State Statistics Service we will assess the monitoring and see if the data for overall unemployment are confirmed," she said, adding, "In a number of cases we see considerable growth, peaks of unemployment."
There are questions to ask about the calculation of overall unemployment by the State Statistics Service, Golikova said. The minister noted that the main instruments for assessing the unemployment level are monitoring and opinion polls made on the basis of standards of ILO (International Labour Organization).
"We will sort things out jointly with the State Statistics Service as to the data on the basis of which overall unemployment is recorded," she said.
The minister cited the example of the Ivanovo region for which highly overrated indexes of the total unemployment were given. "We see a number of regions in Russia where discrepancy between registered and overall unemployment is very large," she said.
According to the Health and Social Development Ministry, there are 2.19 million officially registered unemployed in Russia now. Meanwhile, according to the State Statistics Service, Russia's overall unemployment made up 7.7 million in January-March 2009, with the growth of 2.7 percent in April.
"We do not change the forecast for the end of 2009 - 2.8 million officially registered unemployed," Golikova said. Asked about the forecast for the fourth quarter, she said: "I would not make the forecast in June for the situation with registered unemployment in the fourth quarter."
Golikova touched upon the matter of employment of graduates of higher educational establishments. "Russian regions and the Education and Science Ministry closely follow the situation with graduates' employment or their continuing studies," she said. Regarding the overall situation, Golikova remarked: "I believe we will see the lowering of unemployment in the summer."
Source : ITAR-TASS - World Service Wire
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