By Gustavo Capdevila
GENEVA, Jul 12 1999 (IPS)

Eastern Europe and the Community of Independent States (CIS) are backsliding in areas of human equality and see few benefits from globalisation, said the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The Human Development Report 1999, distributed by the UNDP on Monday, says that never before has there been such a drastic change in the distribution of income as has been reported by the transitional economies.

On the list of the 45 countries with highest human development, led by Canada and ending with Costa Rica, just four were countries with transitional economies: Slovenia ranked 33rd in the world, the Czech Republic at 36, Slovakia at 42 and Poland at 44.

The region’s 14 other countries were listed in the second category – middle-level human development – with Hungary ranked 47 and Tadzhikistan last in the range at 108.

The Russian Federation appears among the many countries that have benefited – to some extent – from the expansion of markets and technological advances related to globalisation.

Most of the 55 countries experiencing a reduction in income can be found in Eastern Europe and the CIS, as well as sub-Saharan Africa.

Co-efficients measuring income inequalities show that the countries of Eastern Europe and the CIS have seen some of the largest increases in disparity ever reported.

The health insecurity issue places primary risk on the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV), which can lead to acquired immuno- deficiency syndrome (AIDS).

In this area, the UN report states that the epidemic is now spreading rapidly in new areas, such as rural India, Eastern Europe and the CIS.

In the early 1990s, Eastern Europe and the CIS appeared to have escaped the worst effects of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, but new studies report enormous growth in infection rates in Belarus, Moldavia, Russia and the Ukraine.

In these countries, says the report, HIV/AIDS is generally associated with poverty as it is spread among the marginalised population, mostly through drug use.

Some of the region’s countries stand out for their appalling statistics in illegal trade of drugs, weapons and the prostitution of women, as well as money laundering.

The UNDP reports that drug-related crime cases increased from four per 100,000 people in Belarus in 1990, to 28 per 100,000 in 1997. In Estonia, it grew from one to eight per 100,000 in the same period.

The document describes the ongoing process in Eastern European countries and the CIS as a dramatic transition from economic systems of central planning to market democracies.

The continued expansion of exports and of exception growth in capital flow, said the Human Development Report, hide the enormous disparities among countries and regions.

Bulgaria joins Niger, Togo and Zambia as the only countries that were not part of the wave in export growth and saw their foreign sales fall.

Direct foreign investment in 1997 reached 400 billion dollars, of which 58 percent went to industrialised nations, 37 percent to developing countries, and just five percent to the Eastern European and CSI transitional economies.

Russia currently reports the greatest income disparity. The richest 20 percent of the Russian population takes in 11 times more than the poorest 20 percent.

In less than a decade, income inequalities for the region surpassed the levels of the industrialised nations who are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

But inequalities grew principally in the Russian Federation and in other countries of the CSI, and to a lesser extent in Eastern Europe.

In the Ukraine and the Russian Federation, the annual growth of the Gini co-effient – a method for measuring inequalities – was three to four times greater than in the United States and Great Britain.

As far as Internet access – another measure of human development, the region’s total users represent just 0.4 percent of the total population. The only regions with fewer Internet users are the Arab nations with 0.2 percent, and sub-Saharan Africa with 0.1 percent.

Estonia is an exception, according to the report. The Baltic nation has made a great effort to facilitate Internet access for its 1.4 million people.

Currently more than 1 of 10 Estonians has Internet access and the country is among the 15 European countries with the most computers per person, ahead of France and Italy.

The transformation of industrialised nations with the advent of globalisation – which reduced government services and promoted privatisation – had dramatic consequences in Eastern Europe and the CSI, deepening the enourmous human costs of economic transition, says the report.

The dismantling and weakening of the State in the region’s nations has meant a general reduction and deterioration in health services and education, contributing to the low results on the human development scale.

Life expectancy was less in 1995 than it was in 1989 in seven of the 18 countries of eastern Europe and the CSI, with a reduction of up to five years compared to 1987.

In Lithuania between 1989 and 1995, preschool registration rates dropped from 64 percent to 35 percent of children between three and six years. In Russia, preschool rates for the same period fell from 69 to 54 percent.

The responsibility for preschool education has been tranferred from the State to the parents, which brought serious consequences for mothers with children in that age group, states the report.

In Russia, between 1989 and 1996, salaries dropped 48 percent, while the portion of salaries in the national income diminished from 74 to 55 percent. However, rents and other types of income jumped from 5 to 23 percent.

Russia is suffering serious human deprivation, said the UNDP, and homicide and drug-trafficking continue on a rapid rise.

The study identifies the deepest causes of the phenomenon as being inefficient governments, lack of the rule of law, crime, concentration of power, and an imperfect market economy.

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