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Ukraine Initiative
Ukraine has lost close to a quarter of its civilian workforce since the invasion. Three and a half million workers left government-controlled areas: mobilised into the armed forces, displaced inside the country, gone abroad as refugees, or killed.
Giacomo Anastasia, Tito Boeri, and Oleksandr Zholud draw on an unprecedented wartime dataset to document how Ukraine’s labour market adapted under that pressure. What they find is not what you might expect. Aggregate matching efficiency fell by only about 15%; less than the decline recorded in the United States during the 2008 financial crisis. Firms hired women into roles previously closed to them by law, took on older workers and people with disabilities, and expanded remote work to keep displaced employees and refugees connected to Ukrainian payrolls. The collapse was real, but concentrated: in contested territories near the frontline, employment fell to less than half its pre-war level and vacancy postings dropped to virtually zero. The question the paper poses for reconstruction is how to sustain that resilience, absorb close to a million returning soldiers, and begin to reverse what five years of disrupted schooling has done to a generation.
