The effects on inequality and mobility of exposure to Soviet Communism in Eastern Europe

Joan Costa-Font, Anna Nicińska and Melcior Rosello-Roig

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We compare inequality and social mobility trends in European countries exposed to Soviet Communist (SC) regimes with those not exposed, using similar welfare measures. We draw upon a rich retrospective dataset that collects relevant welfare measures across regimes including information on living space and self-reported health, and relevant inequality and mobility indices for ordinal and categorical data. Our results suggest evidence of comparable welfare inequality trends in countries exposed to SC and those unexposed. Although individuals exposed to SC enjoyed higher levels of social mobility, differences in inequality across countries exposed to different regimes were negligible. A plausible explanation lies in the countervailing role of the welfare state in countries not exposed to SC and the inefficiency of the bureaucratic allocation of private goods aimed at reducing inequality in countries exposed to SC.

Keywords: bureaucracy; education; European Communist Regimes; health inequality; living space; self-reported health; social mobility; Soviet Communism; welfare (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H53 I38 N34 P20 P29 P36 P46 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2026-03-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
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Published in Journal of Comparative Economics, 10, March, 2026, 54(1), pp. 40 - 65. ISSN: 0147-5967

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:128960

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