COVID and Sanctions Resiliency in a Russian Region: The Case of Rostov Oblast 2010–2022

AbstractUsing convergence estimations, the economies of the towns and districts of Rostov Oblast are shown to be resilient to four shocks to the economy – initial sanctions (2019), initial COVID and continuing sanctions (2020), continuing sanctions and worsening COVID (2021), war, harsher sanctions and declining COVID (2022). Agricultural output is resilient and represents an important growth sector for the Russian economy. Housing and floor area construction are resilient with even gross production being maintained. Labor indicators show a severe shock to unemployment and vacancies in 2020 followed by recovery in 2021 and a much tighter labor market in 2022.Keywords: ConvergenceO47R11R12resiliencyRostov region Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 In March 2022 most of these data on the territorial branch web sites disappeared for several months. However, these data reappeared sometime in fall 2022 with prior months reports now available.2 We did look at both of these variables per square kilometer as well, but the results are no different than just looking at gross production only. Overall area per square kilometer doubled from 8 to 16 between 2014 and 2022 while area per square kilometer for single family housing doubled from 6 to 14 as well.