TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Costa-Font, Joan
AU  - Nicinska, Anna
AU  - Roig, Melcior Rossello
        TI  - The Inequality and Mobility of Exposure to European Soviet Communism
        PY  - 2025/Jun/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 17934
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp17934
        AB  - We compare inequality and social mobility trends in European countries exposed to Soviet Communist (SC) regimes with those not exposed, using similar welfare measures. We draw upon a rich retrospective dataset that collects relevant welfare measures across regimes, including information on living space and self-reported health, and relevant inequality and mobility indices for ordinal and categorical data. Our results suggest evidence of comparable welfare inequality trends in countries exposed to SC regimes and those unexposed. Although individuals exposed to SC enjoyed higher levels of social mobility, differences in inequality across countries exposed to different regimes were negligible. A plausible explanation lies in the countervailing role of the welfare state in countries not exposed to SC and the inefficiency of the bureaucratic allocation of private goods aimed at reducing inequality in countries exposed to SC.
        KW  - health inequality
KW  - welfare
KW  - self-reported health
KW  - living space
KW  - inequality
KW  - European Communist Regimes
KW  - education; social mobility; Soviet Communism
KW  - bureaucracies
        ER  -