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Nowadays the situation of supply-demand imbalances in the professionals’ labor markets causes human capital losses as far as hampers scientific and innovation development. In Russia, supply-demand imbalances in the engineering labor market are associated with deindustrialization processes and manufacturing decline, resulted in a negative public perception of the engineering profession and high rates of graduates not working within the specialty or changing their occupation.

For analysis of the supply-demand imbalances in the engineering labor market, we elaborated a macroeconomic model. The model consists of 14 blocks, including blocks for demand and supply for engineers and technicians, along with the blocks for macroeconomic indicators as industry and service sector output, capital investment. Using this model, we forecasted the perspective supply-demand imbalances in the engineering labor market in a short-term period and examined the parameters of getting supply-demand balance in the medium-term perspective.

The results obtained show that situation of more balanced supply and demand for engineering labor is possible if there is simultaneous increase in the share of investments in fixed assets of manufacturing and relative wages in industry, besides getting to balance is facilitated by a decrease of the share of graduates not working by specialty. It is worth noting that a decrease in the share of graduates not working by specialty may be affected whether by the growth of relative wages in industry and number of vacancies or by the implementation of measures aimed at improving the working conditions of the engineering workforce and increasing the attractiveness of the profession. To summarize, in the case of the simplest scenario, not considering additional measures of working conditions improvement and increasing the attractiveness of the profession, the conditions of supply-demand balance achievement implies slightly lower growth rates of investment in industry than required in scenarios that involve increasing the share of engineers and technicians working in their specialty after graduation. The latter case, where a gradual decrease in the proportion of those who do not work in engineering specialty is expected, requires, probably, higher investment costs for attracting specialists and creating new jobs, as well as additional measures to strengthen the attractiveness of the engineering profession.

The article substantiates the need to develop and analyze mathematical models that take into account the mutual influence of long (Kondratiev) waves of economic development. The analysis of the available publications shows that at the model level, the direct and inverse relationships between intersecting long waves are still insufficiently studied. As practice shows, the production of the current long wave can receive an additional impetus for growth from the technologies of the next long wave. The technologies of the next industrial revolution often serve as improving innovations for the industries born of the previous industrial revolution. As a result, the new long wave increases the amplitude of the oscillations of the trajectory of the previous long wave. Such results of the interaction of long waves in the economy are similar to the effects of interference of physical waves. The mutual influence of the recessions and booms of the economies of different countries gives even more grounds for comparing the consequences of this mutual influence with the interference of physical waves. The article presents a model for the development of the technological base of production, taking into account the possibilities of combining old and new technologies. The model consists of several sub-models. The use of a different mathematical description for the individual stages of updating the technological base of production allows us to take into account the significant differences between the successive phases of the life cycle of general purpose technologies, considered in modern literature as the technological basis of industrial revolutions. One of these phases is the period of formation of the appropriate infrastructure necessary for the intensive diffusion of new general purpose technology, for the rapid development of industries using this technology. The model is used for illustrative calculations with the values of exogenous parameters corresponding to the logic of changing long waves. Despite all the conditionality of the illustrative calculations, the configuration of the curve representing the change in the return on capital in the simulated period is close to the configuration of the real trajectory of the return on private fixed assets of the US economy in the period 1982-2019. The factors that remained outside the scope of the presented model, but which are advisable to take into account when describing the interference of long waves of economic development, are indicated.