Did Living Standards Converge? Beyond GDP in Post-Socialist Europe and Russia

Three decades after the fall of communism, GDP convergence is widely cited as evidence that the post-socialist transition succeeded. But GDP is a narrow measure of living standards. This paper asks whether convergence toward Western Europe holds up once health, inequality, and leisure are also taken into account. We construct a comprehensive welfare measure for Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Russia, benchmarked against Germany, covering the 1980s through 2022. In every country, welfare relative to Germany falls well below what GDP alone would suggest. Russia’s welfare stands at roughly half its GDP level, driven by the post-Soviet mortality crisis and extreme inequality—challenging characterisations of Russia as a “normal” middle-income country. Hungary, conventionally grouped with the Visegrad convergence successes, suffers a substantial welfare shortfall driven by decades of poor health outcomes. Poland emerges as the strongest performer in convergence dynamics. Life expectancy is the largest contributor to this gap.