Regional poverty disparity and economic performance in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia

Christina Peters, Ron Sprout and Robyn Melzig

Post-Communist Economies, 2010, vol. 22, issue 3, 345-365

Abstract: While most of the inequality literature focuses on income inequalities by Gini coefficient, this article develops an alternative index that measures the extent of poverty disparities across geographical regions. In contrast to trends in income inequalities, there is little evidence that regional poverty disparities have peaked and are falling in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Using panel data for the transition countries, we find that high levels of regional poverty disparity have a positive impact on macroeconomic performance. Further evidence suggests this result may be driven by the positive effect of disparities on both saving and the pace of economic reforms. However, it appears that disparities are beneficial to progress on both economic and democratic reforms only for countries with per capita income levels above USD3000.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14631377.2010.498684 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:pocoec:v:22:y:2010:i:3:p:345-365

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CPCE20

DOI: 10.1080/14631377.2010.498684

Access Statistics for this article

Post-Communist Economies is currently edited by Roger Clarke

More articles in Post-Communist Economies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().