A Decade of Transition [antikvár]

ExecutiveThis Report focuses on the 410 million people who live in the 27 countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). It looks at trends in their well-being between 1989 and 1999: a decade of transition that closed their countries' prolonged experiment with communism and that opened new perspectives to development. The Report looks at household incomes, health, education and children in public care, in each case analysing the changes in outcomes during the 1990s and the policies affecting these outcomes.Chapter i: Changing SocietiesThe Report starts by considering the twin goals that have shaped the region since 1989: to create democratic societies in which human rights flourish - including economic, social and cultural rights - and to move economic organization from a planned to a market system. These goals have been pursued by many newly independent countries: only five nations from 1989 remain intact today. The birth of most of the 22 new states has been peacefiil, but ethnic conflict and war have occurred in more than a third of the region's countries. At the end of 2000, 2.2 million people were registered as internally displaced within their own countries, and almost a million as refugees elsewhere.Many countries have made substantial progress in economic reform. By 2000 more than half of the region's output was being produced in the private sector The great majority of economies were growing. However, at the end of the 1990s the national income per head of only three countries had surpassed its 1989 level; on average, it was still 30 percent down.Eight out of 20 key social indicators show progress between 1989 and 1999 in the majority of countries: infant mortality, adolescent birth, abortion, higher education enrolment, maternal mortality, youth mortality and life expectancy for both men and women. But in 17 of the 27 countries the majority of indicators ended the 1990s registering setbacks. Upper secondary enrolment rates rose in only eight countries, and the percentage of 0-3 year-olds in infant homes fell in only six.There have been huge demographic shifts. The total number of children in the region - 108 million - is about 13 percent fewer than in 1989. The number of children aged under 5 fell by over a third, from 36 million to 23 million. This was due to a sharp drop in births. Marriage rates also fell by a third on average.and the average share of children bom out of wedlock doubled, from IT percent to 22 percent.Four conclusions are drawn from the economic and demographic trends reviewed in the chapter as a background for the rest of the Report. First, the region's economies have in general turned the corner, and growth in the years ahead will need to be harnessed to the benefit of all. Second, countries across the region can do much to make their public sectors more efficient and "pro-poor". Third, public policies need to recognize the changing nature of the family. Fourth, the huge fall in births means that there is no excuse for inadequate investment in younger generations.Chapter 2: Income Inequality and Child PovertyTransition has led to changes in the distribution of income, as well as in average incomes. In the late 1980s, a rich person had an income that was typically about three to three and a half times that of a poor person (defined, respectively, as someone 10 percent down from the top of the income distribution and someone 10 percent up from the bottom). At the end of the 1990s this ratio was as big as eight to ten in several countries. Chapter 2 looks at the growth in the gap in income between rich and poor, at the extent of poverty among children, at bow families cope with economic hardship and at government policy to tackle child poverty.Income inequality in the region at the end of the com munist period was low compared to that in most of the OECD. By the late 1990s, the average value of a standard inequality index (the Gini coefficient) in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic states had risen to about the average OECD level, but in much of the CIS to well above this level. At the end of the 1990s, the extent of income differences in Russia, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia and Taj ikistan resembled that found in Latin America.Most income inequality originates in the labour market. Unemployment rates in the late 1990s in transition countries were about a third higher on average than those in the OECD, and in every country for which data are available the incidence of low pay -measured as earnings below two-thirds of the national median - exceeded the OECD average of 14 percent, often by a large amount. One consequence of the widespread occurrence of low pay is a high degree of poverty among working families.At the end of the 1990s there were neariy 18 million children in the region in households living on less