findings:level of payments may have been too small to eliminate long-term adverse effects of market transition; in each country case state transfers to individuals reduced their poverty and were at least short-term beneficial; poverty most feminized in Hungary, least feminized in Bulgaria
channels:poverty may have feminized as market transitions progressed; larger positive transfer effects for low-education households
notes:increased probability for poverty of low-education, large, Roma households
annotation:|
A study on the effects of direct state transfers to people in poverty in the post-socialist countries of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
It first lookst at the correlations of socio-demographic characteristics with poverty to find that in each country there was an increased probability for poverty of low-education, larger and predominantly Roma households.
It also found that poverty itself was most feminized Hungary, the country with the most advanced market transition in the study period, and least feminized in Bulgaria, the country with the least advanced market transition, and suggests that poverty may have feminized as the market transitions progressed.
For the state transfers it found that while the level of payments may have been too small to eliminate longer-term adverse effects of the market transitions,
in each country's case the transfers to individuals reduced their poverty and were beneficial at least in the short term.
The authors thus suggest that their findings may be compatible both with an institutionalist perspective seeing poverty-eliminating benefits in the short term and with an underclass perspective which contends that nonetheless the transfers do not eliminate the deprivations members of disadvantaged groups face, while providing little evidence for generating welfare dependency proposed in a more neoclassical perspective.
However, due to no long-term panel data available to fully analyse the underclass and neoclassical arguments, these findings should not be understood too generalizable.
