As many as one million working-age men died due to the
economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist
countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The
Lancet.
The Oxford-led study measured the relationship
between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25
countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to
the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human
cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or
the equivalent of about one million lives.
The rapid
privatisation programme, part of a plan known by economists as ‘shock
therapy’, led to a 56 per cent increase in unemployment, which the study
says played an important role in explaining why privatisation claimed
so many lives. Many employers provided extensive health and social care
for their employees, so through privatisation workers experienced the
‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means
of surviving the crisis.
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