The Veil of Communism: An Analysis of Lifespan, GDP per Capita, Human Capital, and Agricultural Productivity in Eastern Europe

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: There is a clear economic difference between the more economically-developed Western Europe and their poorer counterparts in Eastern Europe and central Asia. But what caused this economic divergence? How big of a role did communism play? If communism is responsible, through what economic mechanisms did it manage to hinder growth? This paper will look at GDP/capita, growth in GDP/capita, human capital, labor to land ratio, ratio of unskilled to skilled workers, growth in lifespan, average expenditure per student and variations in these outcomes in order to determine a more specific impact of communism. This paper finds not only that communism had a huge negative impact on growth, but that even though communism was completely gone from Europe by 1991; it still impacts the growth of former communist countries. Moreover, there seem to be 2 blocks of countries within the communist bloc: non-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe and Soviet Eastern Europe and Central Asia and these two regions behave very differently.

Type of resource	text
Date created	May 2012

Author	Dăian, Matei
Primary advisor	Manova, Kalina
Degree granting institution	Stanford University, Department of Economics

Subject	communism
Subject	economic growth
Subject	GDP per capita
Subject	human capital
Subject	labor to land ratio
Subject	ratio of unskilled to skilled workers
Subject	lifespan
Subject	expenditure per student
Subject	Stanford Department of Economics
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/wc673pm0081

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Preferred Citation: Dăian, Matei. (2012). The Veil of Communism: An Analysis of Lifespan, GDP per Capita, Human Capital, and Agricultural Productivity in Eastern Europe. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/wc673pm0081

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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