The Income Inequality In The Eastern European Countries: A Comparative Study For The Period 1990-2010

This paper realizes a comparative study among Eastern European countries regarding their ways of economic growth characterized by a higher or lower increase of inequality in their income distribution. The market liberalization from the early 1990s in the former communist countries have resulted in new distributions of income and wealth, the new structural sources of poverty and inequality being often more extreme. The paper will focus on the factors that contributed to the rising social inequality in ten post communist countries, from 1990 to 2010, emphasizing on four main macroeconomic performance indicators, the annual economic growth rate, income distribution as Gini coefficient, Human Development Index, and gross fixed capital formation rate for showing the level of investments. We will conclude at the end of the paper that in the last twenty years, between the former communist countries from Eastern Europe, the gaps in distribution between the high and low income groups tend to enlarge, especially since all of them are developing countries. Although none of the countries from this region exceeds the critical upper level of 40% on the Gini scale coefficient, together with a continuous degradation of the human development index in the last two decades, the evolution of these countries is at least questionable.