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Dynamics of Welfare in Economies in Transition

Student: Matkovskaia Veronika

Supervisor: Dmitry A. Veselov

Faculty: Faculty of Economic Sciences

Educational Programme: Economics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2020

This research investigates how the transition process affected people’s welfare in the Central and Eastern European countries and the former Soviet Union through the period of 1990-2017. The analysis is based on the evaluation of a summary statistic of the economic well-being of people proposed by Jones and Klenow (2016). It incorporates consumption, leisure, mortality, and inequality. As a result of the study, it was found that at the beginning of the transition from a planned to a market economy welfare in the countries was on average lower than GDP per capita shows. The most significant gap was in the countries of the former USSR - about 20%. Although the dynamics of the welfare indicator and GDP in general coincide, the transformational crisis in terms of the welfare indicator turned out to be less deep than the GDP indicates. Nowadays, the quality of life of the population in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe actually turns out to be on average 7% closer to the standards of developed countries than GDP per capita indicates, when we take into account longer life expectancy, extra leisure time and lower levels of inequality in addition to income, while the countries of the former Soviet Union are 12% poorer than incomes suggest.

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