The transition process has had different distributional impacts across different interest groups and countries. These have led to differences in the support for transition. In this paper, we study support attitudes for both the economic and political transition using data from the New Barometer Surveys for 14 transition economies from 1991 to 2004. We document that the overall support is low and heterogeneous across countries and individuals. Support attitudes are lower among the old, less skilled, unemployed, poor, and those living in the CIS countries. There seems to be an increasing trend in the support for the economic transition in most countries. Our findings are robust to changes in the definition and measurement of the dependent variable. We also find evidence that transition-related hardship, opinions on the speed of reforms, political preferences and preferences towards redistribution, ideology and social capital matter. Finally, we show that individual preferences for secure jobs, the role of state and trust in politicians as well as better institutions, in particular, the quality of governance, seem to contribute mostly to explaining the lower levels of the support in the CIS countries.
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Paper provided by Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in its series IZA Discussion Papers with number
4224.
Find related papers by JEL classification: O57 - Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values P26 - Economic Systems - - Socialist Systems and Transition Economies - - - Political Economy P36 - Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions - - - Consumer Economics; Health, Education, Welfare, and Poverty
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References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Sergei Guriev & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, 2007.
"(Un)Happiness in Transition,"
Working Papers
w0111, Center for Economic and Financial Research (CEFIR).
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