A sizable share of refugees (compared with earlier conflict-caused migrations) already got a job and sent kids to schools in receiving countries. UNHCR (2022) Survey shows that the majority of adult refugees have a higher education (70%) and had a job before leaving (63%). Almost 5 million refugees are registered in the EU under the Temporary Protection Directive, a measure that allows them to choose their destination country and work there immediately (this allowed for a more balanced distribution of refugees, when compared to other waves – Figure 2). About 5.9 million people are currently internally displaced (IOM, 2022), while more than another 7.9 million are refugees abroad: this was the largest migration crisis in Europe since World War II ( UNHCR data ), with women and children accounting for almost 90 percent of the refugees. On the workers’ side, the exodus of human capital was unprecedented: the war forced more than a third of Ukrainian population (estimated in 2021 at 41 million) to move. The Russian invasion in February 2022 disrupted the Ukrainian labor market, causing an overall shrinking of it as well as a huge mismatch – geographic and sectoral – between labor supply and demand. The strict quarantine restrictions had a negative impact on employment dynamics and incomes: the poverty level in Q2’2020 increased by 24.5% y-o-y (Libanova, 2021). The pandemic-related restrictions imposed in 2020-2021 during the pandemic on trade, transport, and services, as well as the uncertainty about over the spread of the contagion, induced strong declines not only in the demand, but also in the supply of labour. The pandemic has only made the situation worse. In the early 2000s Ukraine had one of the world lowest fertility rates and was experiencing a sizable outmigration (Libanova, 2019). All this was occurring against a demographic background of an aging population and a low fertility rate, implying a rapidly shrinking labor force, as noted for example in Gladun (2020).
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