A Political Economy Perspective on Redistribution and Growth in Transition

Michael Keane () and Eswar Prasad

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Poland undertook a rapid and decisive set of political and economic reforms starting in 1989-90, a period that has become known as the big bang. A widely held view is that, in all of the transition economies, the economic upheaval associated with the process of transition has led to substantial increases in inequality, thereby complicating the process of reform. In this paper, we use micro data from the Polish Household Budget Surveys (HBS) to show that the increase in overall income inequality in Poland during the transition was actually quite modest. Our analysis indicates that social transfers played an important role in attenuating the rise in overall income inequality and, by extension, in maintaining the social and political cohesion that was essential for the reform process.

Keywords: economics of transition; inequality; growth; Poland (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H53 H55 I3 O1 P2 P26 P3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/54289/1/MPRA_paper_54289.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:54289

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().