Page 16 - UKRRptFeb19

(Poverty numbers are actually hard to come by and the poverty line varies widely from country to country. This chart uses the latest available number taken from a variety of sources like Eurostat, the World Bank and various academic studies. The issue of different poverty lines is not taken into account here, but as poverty is a relative concept the conclusions are still generally valid.)
Eastern Europe
The EU is the base line and poverty is relatively high 17.% in 2018 as the Continent is still recovering from the 2008 crisis when youth unemployment spiked to 50% in some countries and the prolonged austerity has still not worn off. At the same time EU inflation is a low 1.6% in November and unemployment was a modest 7.9% giving the EU a despair index value of 26.8.
The surprise in Eastern Europe is that Belarus has an extraordinary despair value of only 8.3 – the lowest in the entire Soviet block – mainly because poverty is a very low 3.2%.
Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko is viewed as a slightly crazy autocrat from outside the country, but inside he retains a core popularity because of this low despair index number. Unlike Russia where life expectancy plunged, pensioners and middle aged employees in 1991 continued to get many of the Soviet era support and kept their jobs while other countries crashed around them.
“Perhaps one of Lukashenka’s greatest achievements in Belarusian society has been his fight against poverty. In the worst years of the 1990s, half of the population of Belarus was languishing below the poverty line. This figure is now 10 times smaller,” the World Bank said in a report on poverty.
However, Belarusian statistics cannot be taken entirely at face value. The official unemployment rate is 0.5% but the World Bank estimates true unemployment is probably five times higher.
Poverty is a big issue in Russia too. Just under 20mn Russians are on or under the poverty line and president Vladimir Putin promised to halve the number as part of his May Decrees programme to “transform” the country.
However, the poverty rate in Russia was 13.2% in 2018 and together with post-Soviet record low unemployment and inflation Russia is in the top ten. Russia’s low despair index number of 20.6 is even ahead of the EU, which is ranked 11 in comparison to New Europe.
16 UKRAINE Country Report February 2019 www.intellinews.com