Living standards continue steep fall in Eastern Europe

[Hannah Bell]

In the course of its meeting in Istanbul earlier this month, the World Bank issued a report which indicates the vast decline in living standards which has taken place in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the wake of the global economic and financial crisis. Titled “Global Crisis Hits Home in Emerging Europe and Central Asia”, the report speaks of a “sharp rise in unemployment and poverty” throughout the region...

The World Bank calculates that unemployment in the region has leapt from 8.3 million in 2008 to 11.4 million in 2009. It has doubled in the Baltic countries, grown by 60 percent in Turkey, and by one-third in other countries in the region...

Commenting on the role of the European Union in this process, Ivan Krastev, director of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, noted in 2004: “It is striking to observe that when the EU supports projects to promote economic development beyond its borders, it exports a version of the same type of neo-liberal orthodoxy that it denounces at home.” The result of this policy has been unprecedented levels of social inequality and poverty throughout the region...

Kislitsyna notes that what is exceptional about the development of social inequality in Russia is the speed at which it has taken place. Within less than two decades a society in which living standards were generally low due to the disastrous policies of the Stalinist bureaucracies, but still relatively egalitarian, has been transformed into one of the most unequal societies on the planet.

Despite a revival of economic growth in recent years, Russia’s economic performance today is still only around three quarters of what it was in 1989, prior to the introduction of the capitalist free market. GDP declines in other former Soviet satellite states are much more dramatic. In 2008—-before the onset of the global crisis—-the economies of Georgia and Moldova had shrunk to around 40 percent of what they produced in 1989.

At the same time, the growth of income inequality in Russia has come at an enormous social cost. According to the British Medical Journal, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to a huge rise in death rates in Russia, with the biggest increase registered in deaths due to alcohol, followed by deaths resulting from accidents and violence.

According to the research of the epidemiologist Michael Marmot, presented in his 2004 book The Status Syndrome, the restoration of capitalism in the 1990s produced a death toll of about four million people...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/east-o24.shtml

[PDJane]

1. And this is a surprise?

It shouldn't be.

Life expectancy has been dropping too.

[anonymous171]

2. Now that the commies are gone, I think we need to turn our attention to the capitalists

Nowadays they seem to be the biggest threat to world peace and prosperity.

[Skittles]

3. AMEN TO THAT

[HamdenRice]

4. Does anyone give a shit what WSWS thinks about anything?

[Hannah Bell]

5. can you read?

"the World Bank issued a report"

[HamdenRice]

7. Can you read anything other than WSWS cult propaganda?

Because this is cited to WSWS, which lies compulsively and pervasively, there's really no way of know whether the World Bank actually did issue a report or not, and if they did issue a report, no sane person would trust WSWS to accurately characterize whatever was in it.

[marmar]

10. Regardless of what one thinks of the source, that jump in unemployment is pretty hard to gloss over.

The 'free market' has failed the former Soviet bloc as badly as totalitarian communism did.

[SoCalDem]

6. When most are poor, and they see that they are not singled out,

it's easier to accept lower living standards..
Once you have gone "up", you'll be mad as hell to drop

I would bet that MOST people would prefer a life where there were certainties, and guarantees of health care, old age pensions, unemployment stipends, & housing allotments, even if it meant they had less cash or purchase-able goods.

[JVS]

8. I think we should take a page from Robert Conquest and call the increased mortality rates genocide.

[vadawg]

9. how come, in what way is this genocide....

[JVS]

11. In the same way that the deaths that Robert Conquest et al label genocide are.

In their ideological zeal, the "reformers" of the late 1980s through the present have killed many and established a murderous system.

[vadawg]

12. got you now, and i disagree.... thanks

[Nikki Stone1]

13. These little republics got sold out in the early 90s and Russia's economy was pillaged

The neoliberalist ideology is all about taking money from the people of the nation and transferring it to Wall Street, hence those godawful restructuring loans by the IMF.

We are quickly joining our Eastern European brethren.