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INCOME DISTRIBUTION IN THE U.S.S.R. IN THE 1980s
Author(s) -
Alexeev Michael V.,
Gaddy Clifford G.
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
review of income and wealth
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.024
H-Index - 57
eISSN - 1475-4991
pISSN - 0034-6586
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-4991.1993.tb00435.x
Subject(s) - accession , income distribution , inequality , economics , soviet union , economic inequality , distribution (mathematics) , log normal distribution , income inequality metrics , econometrics , nonparametric statistics , demographic economics , european union , statistics , political science , economic policy , mathematics , law , mathematical analysis , politics
In 1989 Soviet authorities released unprecedented new data on the size distribution of income in the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, including the distributions by republics. With the goal of providing a benchmark for evaluating the effect of current and future economic reforms on income distribution in the former Soviet Union, this paper estimates inequality measures for the new data. The estimation uses a simple nonparametric technique based on the Kolmogorov‐Smirnov test to fit the Soviet data to a lognormal distribution. The results suggest that, for income from official sources, (1) inequality in the Soviet Union as a whole declined throughout the 1980s‐both before and after Gorbachev's accession in 1985, and (2) income inequality was greater in the poorer, southern republics of the U.S.S.R. than in the north. While the inclusion of unofficial (unreported) private income would probably reinforce the second of these two trends, its effect on the first cannot be determined on the basis of available information.