Editor’s Introduction

Review of Income and Wealth. 2022. Vol. 68. No. S1. P. 1–2.

Voskoboynikov I.

This special issue presents a selection from the papers presented at the conference on “Experiences and Challenges in Measuring Income and Wealth in CIS Countries and Eastern Europe”, jointly organized by the International Association for Research in Income and Wealth (IARIW) and National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University) in Moscow on 17–18, September 2019. This conference marks a significant event being the first IARIW conference held on the territory of the former Soviet Union.

             The IARIW has historical roots in Eastern Europe. The first IARIW chairman, Simon Kuznets (1901-1985), was born in Pinsk (Belarus today). He started his academic training here in Eastern Europe, at the Kharkov Commercial Institute (Ukraine) and published his first paper “Money wages of factory employees in Kharkov in 1920” (in Russian), just before his emigration to the United States. The debates on Soviet industrialization in the early 1920s; his teachers in the institute and early experience of the analysis of the Soviet economy in the turmoil years of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War; as well as professional contacts and reading of economic literature in Russian in the 1920s and early 1930s contributed to his professional outlook (Syrquin, 2021). These topics and debates are echoed in this IARIW Conference Program. Two major themes, the risk of the middle-income trap, and the causes and consequences of inequality run through the papers in this issue.

Keywords: Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, восточная Европа и страны СНГ, бедность и неравенство, middle-income trap, inequality and poverty, ловушка среднего дохода

Publication based on the results of: Производительность, рост и межотраслевой анализ российской экономики Russia KLEMS (2023)