Due to the reduction of the ablebodied population, one of the main problems in the modern labour market is to deal with the labour force deficit by spurring a more efficient use of these resources. The article presents results of the study which dealt with the development and testing of the methodology for building predictive estimates of employment for the main economic activities on the basis of econometric models, with account to seasonal factor. This approach allowed to increase the validity of the short-term forecasts, prove the importance of impact of supply and demand characteristics that define productivity and demographic situation on the employment, as well as to assess the ability of the labor market to self-regulate.

The authors have shown that in the near future the transformation of the structure of employment by economic activity will continue. The number of people employed in the wholesale and retail trade will gradually increase, absorbing the flow of labor resources from manufacturing industries and agriculture. The authors substantiate the need for additional adjustments that take into account the economy requirements for labour resources, and are aimed at ensuring effective employment structure.

The author substantiates relevant statistically significant factors of regional labour productivity growth: availability of production means to the regional economy, investment and innovative potential of the region, investment policy of the region. Due to this, the article proposes a set of independent variables and testes econometric models of regional labour productivity based on current statistical information about the development of Russian regions, which allowed for measuring growth reserves of work productivity in Russia and providing recommendations on their optimization.

The article reflects author’s ideas on development and justification of recommendations for optimizing state investments distribution in order to invest in the most successful (in terms of the increase of the number of highly productive jobs) regions and their influence on growth of regional labour productivity.

The author concludes that to increase labour productivity in the regions of Russia, it is necessary to ensure wage growth in education and utilities. An important task for the development of Russia’s regional economy is the growth in the number of highly productive jobs in mining, public administration, and financial services.

The economy of any country can be in one of two states: stationary or non-stationary. The state of the economy can be inferred by the average per capita consumption of products, and for durable goods - by their supply; price; the share of expenditures on products in the total expenditures on all products. To determine the values of the three named indicators, the author uses the term «product coordinates». Non-stationary economy has distorted proportions within, which determine its lag in development.

The main objective of this article is to describe tools that allow for each product to determine values corresponding to a stationary economy, based on country-specific data comparisons. Such comparisons are necessary to work out scenario for the optimal development of the economy aimed at consistent elimination of its deviation from the stationary state.

This article examines the definition of indicators for poverty and want with regard to the working-age population of Russia through building and analysis of the distribution of the employees who are paid wages at the level of consumer groups:

-  values for consumer groups boundaries (first of all for groups with accrued wages lower, at or above the poverty line) are introduced;

-   calculation methodology for the frequency and relative frequency of the distribution of employees by main consumer groups is proposed;

-  calculations of the distribution of employees by main consumer groups in the Russian economy over the past 25 years have been made; the development dynamics for each of the groups have been analyzed along with its role in the distribution of employees by consumer groups;

-  dynamics of frequencies and relative frequencies of the number of employees by consumer groups broken down by economic activity is calculated and analyzed;

-   influence of ownership forms of the surveyed organizations on the distribution of employees by consumer groups in the Russian economy as a whole and by economic activity is analyzed;

-  professional composition of consumer groups of the employed working-age population is defined;

-  statistical sources for building the distribution of employees by consumer groups, their opportunities and shortcomings in ensuring the completeness of the analysis, were studied.

The author gives a detailed commentary on the reinstatement in December 2016 statistics as the separate field of higher education in Russia (it was officially abolished in 2013), and emphasizes the significance of this event for training qualified personnel for this area as well as for teaching statistics as an academic discipline. It is aigued that according to the new classification, statistics has been placed in the altogether enlarged group of mathematical and natural sciences, but not in the group of social sciences (economics and management), as it used to be in the Soviet and post-Soviet period. The process of transformation of statistical functions in the state and society is analyzed; modem experience of teaching statistics in Russia, other CIS countries and some countries with the developed market economy is considered.

The final part of the article reveals the most important content-related aspects of the new statistical programs that are being developed now.