Labor potential assessment of rural territories of the Northwestern federal district

Rural territories perform vital national functions - production (especially in producing food and biological raw materials for industrial processing), demographic, labor resource, spatial communication, preservation of historical and cultural bases of peoples’ identity. The purpose of this study is to assess one of the components in this list - labor potential of rural territories of the Northwestern Federal district of the Russian Federation, define the main ways of its effective use and quality development. The relevance of addressing this strategic issue in rural areas is aggravated by the fact that it is not yet possible to halt negative demographic processes in rural regions; migration outflow is increasing; over the past few years there has been a massive reduction in the use of farmland, cultivated areas, in livestock number. The number of settlements is rapidly reducing, the number of people there is decreasing. The scientific basis for this work is the technique developed by the researchers of the Institute of Socio-Economic Development of Territories of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2015 to study the processes in rural areas (municipal units) of the Vologda Oblast...