Poverty Ethnicity and Gender in Transitional Societies

"Both the extent and the character of poverty in Eastern Europe appear to have changed with the transition from socialism to a market economy. There has been not only a substantial increase in the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty, but according to some commentators, the actual character of poverty has changed as well. The conventional wisdom among social scientists is that during socialism poverty was mainly a life-cycle phenomenon. Thus families with large numbers of young children, the temporarily or permanently disabled, and the elderly tended to be poor. Today, however, social class, ethnicity, and/or gender appear to play a more significant role than in the past in terms of predicting or explaining poverty. The surveys are based on statistical data generated by surveys conducted in the six post-communist countries of Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Slovakia during the fall of 1999 and the winter-spring of 2000. Iván Szelényi was the principal investigator; co-principal investigators were Rebecca Emigh, Éva Fodor, and János Ladányi. The research team included a group of senior scholars and advanced Ph.D. students in each country. The papers in this book offer the first results of the analyses. The research team intends to publish several monographs based on this study; therefore, this issue contains merely a glimpse of what is to come. The articles focus on questions regarding the social construction of roma ethnicity, gender issues, while some offer systematic comparisons of the extent and nature of poverty of all countries. Most assuredly, this is the only cross-national study that systematically examines answers to retrospective questions about poverty during socialism."