Trends in social conditions in countries of Eastern Europe, the Baltic states and the commonwealth of Independent States

Abstract

The report covers the countries of eastern Europe, the Baltics and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Readers will be familiar with the economic and social collapse that in many of these countries accompanied that was called transition. Once envisaged as an orderly process of change from a centrally directed to a market economy, the process so far has been neither orderly nor as rapid as might be wished. The old was demolished in many of the countries but without much progress toward the new. An attempt is made here not so much to describe the events of the early, disastrous, stages of transition in the beginning of the 1990s, as to ask what has happened in very recent years. Given the depth of economic decline in many of the countries in transition (CIT), improvements in the economy are probably a necessary, if perhaps not sufficient, condition of social rehabilitation. The report therefore begins with a brief account of changes in the economy and related factors such as employment, wages and consumption. The emphasis, however, is on social conditions. The questions are: how many people have how much income? How many are ill, hungry, cold, badly housed, deprived of education or threatened by criminal activity? Who are they (children, the elderly, farmers, pensioners, the unemployed)? And how is the situation changing or failing to change for the better? It is on these issues, unfortunately, that the statistics are at their weakest. There is no lack of data in general. The trouble is that relatively few of them meet the three essential criteria: relevance, quality and timeliness. The education sector is an example. Traditional indicators include the number of schools, pupils or teachers, or gross enrolment rates, none of which have greatly changed since transition (except pre-school enrolment, which has declined sharply in most of the countries). Especially in the CIS, however, the real problems go virtually unrecorded: children leaving before the end of the school year; defective maintenance of buildings; lack of qualified teachers in crucial subjects; absenteeism; lack of teaching aids, including the basics such as books, paper and pencils; absence of school meals; and the intangible, but nonetheless crucial, element in teaching – the nature and content of what is taught, and the manner in which it is taught.