Intragenerational mobility in successor states of the USSR

After the collapse of the USSR, the post-Soviet states chose different strategies to build up their economy and society. In our research, we use data of young adults in five countries that represent these strategies. Baltic countries, Estonia and Latvia, are the examples of 'bottom up' shock therapy which opened opportunities to everybody and therefore everybody was engaged. Belarus is an example of a country with a still ongoing command economy with very few changes to the market in the late 1990s. The Russian region, Sverdlovsk, and the Ukraine region, Kharkov, are examples of 'top-down' privatisation and still shrinking economy in the late 1990s. We hypothesize that different paths of transition influenced intragenerational mobility patterns for young adults. We estimate the impact of respondents' gender, education, income, economic sector and the characteristics of parental background on intragenerational mobility. We found that Belarus differed from other regions, as young adults there were the least mobile, and the chosen factors had very little explanatory power in the analysis of intragenerational mobility. In the Baltic countries, intragenerational mobility was well explained by typical factors of mobility in a market society. Seven years of transition to the market is too short a time to make statements about long-term trends, but we can still investigate three major strategies to the market and predictability of intragenerational mobility.