Human Development and Women’s Lives in a Restructured Eastern Bloc: Lessons from the Developing World

Most of the economic literature on restructuring eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has centered on macroeconomic adjustments, privatization and price liberalization (for example, Kornai 1992a; Sachs 1992; Fisher and Frenkel 1992). The importance of those policy discussions is obvious enough. What appears at times to be lost in these discussions, however, is that the ultimate goal of economic transformation is improving the quality of life for the people of the former Soviet bloc and not merely the introduction of a functioning market economy.