UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 2, 2016. Ural Vagon Zavod Corporation celebrated the start of school as thousands of employees’ children in Kamensk-Uralsky, Nizhniy Tagil, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, and a number of other cities became first-graders this year, the company press service reports. ‘Ural Vagon Zavod’s head plant’s top managers congratulated the schoolchildren and vocational school students on the start of the new school year in person and came to the school-opening ceremonies. Executive Director Vladimir Roshchupkin came to Gymnasium 86 and School 43 with a welcoming address to students,

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 2, 2016. Prices went down by 3.1% on Yekaterinburg existing home market in the eight months of 2016, Ural Real Estate Chamber reports. As of July 29, 2016, prices stood at 68,510 RUR per m2 on average. Compared with the start of the year, housing prices went down most noticeably in the city’s remotest and least expensive locations; the decrease fluctuates between 4.3% and 4.5%. The average asking price was 51,734 RUR per m2 last December; now the figure is 49,530 RUR per m2 on average. Housing prices declined from 60,260 RUR per m2 down to 57,545 RUR per m2 in

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 2, 2016. The unemployment rate in Sverdlovsk Region stood at 5.4% in May-July 2016; these figures were obtained based on the International Labor Organization’s methodology, Rosstat reports. There are currently 2.216m people of working age in the Mid-Urals, of whom 2.097m are employed and 119,600 are looking for jobs. A year earlier, the unemployment rate was 6.5%; in 2014 and 2013, the figures were 6.1% and 5.9%, respectively.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 2, 2016. Sverdlovsk Region-based employers owed their workers 8.4m RUR in unpaid wages and salaries as of August 1, 2016, Rosstat reports. Interestingly, one year earlier the arrears of wages amounted to 3.922m RUR, and the previous month’s figures reached 8.344m RUR.

UrBC, Yekaterinburg, September 2, 2016. Freight forwarding rates rose by 10.1% in Sverdlovsk Region in January-July 2016 compared with December 2015, Rosstat reports. In the meantime, the overall inflation rate in the Mid-Urals between January and July 2016 was 4%.