Editor’s Introduction

• Published date: 01 April 2022
• Author: Ilya B. Voskoboynikov
• Date: 01 April 2022
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12582

© 2022 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

S1

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

by Ilya b. VoskoboynIkoV1

HSE University

This special issue presents a selection from the papers presented at the con-

ference 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 September 17-18,

2019. This conference is significant in 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 chair-

man, 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; and 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.

The special issue opens with an over- arching survey by Mattias Morys. He

has a mixed assessment of the achievements against the great hopes of a quick

economic catch up in the region after the collapse of the planned economy in

the early 1990s. Dariusz Kotlewski and Mirosław Błażej focus on an issue that

post- transition economies aimed to avoid the middle- income trap, a situation

where an economy is squeezed between the low- wage poor country competi-

tors that dominate in mature industries and the rich- country innovators that

dominate in industries undergoing rapid technological change. Analyses using

the KLEMS framework show that Poland has avoided it. The picture of low

productivity growth in Russia is completed with the firm- level data evidence

(Bessonova and Tsvetkova). Kseniya Bobyleva adds that the Russian economy

differs from many OECD economies in terms of the contribution of intangible

assets to growth.

Review of Income and Wealth

Series 68, Number S1, April 2022

DOI: 10.1111/roiw.12582

1I am grateful to Hartmut Lehmann for helping me with the initial selection of the papers and for

identifying appropriate referees for some of the papers in this issue, and to Moshe Syrquin for useful

comments and suggestions for this introduction.

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