Public beliefs regarding the causes of poverty during transition Evidence from the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia, and Ukraine

Purpose - Low-income transitional countries in the region of the Caucasus and Central Asia lack the existence of a solid assessment of public perceptions regarding the causes of poverty during transition. The purpose of this paper is to fill that gap in the existing literature. Design/methodology/approach - This paper uses the secondary analysis of a recent cross-sectional multinational survey to shed light on public beliefs of the causes of poverty in seven countries of the region - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. In addition, Russia and Ukraine are used as a comparison point. The theoretical framework for this study is that the subjective beliefs regarding the explanations of poverty can be classified into three broad groups: individualistic, fatalistic, and structural. Hence, regression coefficients and marginal effects of the multinomial logit regression model (MNLM) are estimated to associate the set of various individual, households, and community characteristics selected in the conceptual framework with the likelihood of choosing one of the three afore-mentioned explanations of poverty. Findings - The results of cross-tabulation reveal that in a majority of the countries studied, the predominant explanation for poverty is structural, with the exception of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where predominant explanations are, respectively, fatalistic and individualistic. The results of MNLM show that most individual, household, and community characteristics possess the expected direction and are in line with previous findings. However, some of the characteristics have a similar significant effect across several countries, while other characteristics are significant for a single country only. Social implications - These findings demonstrate that despite the dominant post-socialist ideology which favors individualistic and fatalistic explanations of poverty based on the economic rationality of market capitalism, the efforts of the elites in promoting and imposing these ideologies has not been fully successful. Nevertheless, no single unified model of the determinants of beliefs regarding the causes of poverty in the countries of the region is observed. Originality/value - This is one of the very few papers aimed at assessing public perceptions regarding the causes of poverty in transitional countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia.