Page 23 - RusRPTFeb19

change like the Baltic states.
The battle against poverty recolours the politics of transformation. While the economic experts at the IMF and other western institutions talk about the need to put the economy on a market footing, what that did is thrown an entire generation – those aged around 45 or older in 1991 – under the bus, who were incapable of adapting to the new realities. And even if they were, no one in the new companies wanted to employ them. Far easier to train young people as everyone had to be retrained.
The despair index is the simple addition of the poverty rate, inflation and unemployment. In an idea world the index number should be around 4% (0% poverty, 2% inflation and 2% unemployment).
What is unnerving is not even the richest and most developed countries have been able to eradicate poverty, which was 17.3% in the EU in 2018. The best any country in the EU has managed in the last decade was France, which got it down to 15%.
(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.
23 RUSSIA Country Report February 2019 www.intellinews.com