Forty million people moved out of poverty in Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union from 1998 through 2003, leaving 61 million people still poor, a World Bank study released Wednesday found.
The proportion of people in the region living in poverty has fallen from one in five to about one in eight, according to household surveys of consumption, on which the study is based.
Economic growth and rising wages have been driving forces in the decline of poverty, with a strengthened social safety net playing a more modest role, the study found.
It defined the poverty line as $2 or less a day, per person, double the usual global standard because of the added costs of heating and heavy clothing required for the cold climate in the countries involved.
Among families that remain poor, two-thirds work, in contrast with the rest of Europe, where poverty is concentrated among the unemployed.
What lies behind the statistics are the tumultuous changes unfolding in the transition from centrally planned socialism to market capitalism.
Workers are moving from state-owned enterprises to private companies and migrating to cities from farms for construction and service jobs.
In Russia, where poverty doubled to 20 percent at the height of the financial crisis, it fell to 8.5 percent by 2002, the most recent year for which data are available, lower than before the crisis. Preliminary household survey data from 2003 and 2004 indicate poverty continued to decline, said Ruslan Yemtsov, a senior economist at the World Bank and the author of the study.
Progress in reducing poverty has been greatest in the region’s economically dynamic capital cities and least in the countryside.
In Uzbekistan, 4 percent of people in the capital, Tashkent, were in poverty, compared with 55 percent in rural areas. In Kazakh stan, it was 2 percent in the cities of Astana and Almaty and 31 percent in rural areas.