Left behind in transition? The well-being of older people in Tajikistan

Abstract

The break-up of the Soviet Union and the subsequent transition to market-led economies has been accompanied by a decade of economic and social upheaval on an unprecedented scale. In some countries, GDP per capita more than halved during the early 1990s and spending on social services such as health, education and social protection declined even further. There is now a substantial body of literature detailing the impact on the population of the decline in economic and social wellbeing in the new Republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) during the 1990s (Alam et al, 2005; Dudwick et al, 2003; Falkingham 2005; World Bank,2000). However, older people have been largely invisible in this literature, particularly in the poorer countries of the CIS in Central Asia and the Caucasus. One of the few studies explicitly focussing on older people in transition economies was carried out by HelpAge International (2002). However, that study was largely confined to Central and Eastern Europe, with case studies in Bosnia, Estonia, Romania, Moldova and Lithuania. There have also been some studies concerning older people in Russia (Tchernina and Tchernin, 2002). More recently, the European Centre for Social Welfare Policy & Research has carried out a study of ‘Poverty of Elderly People in EU25’, which includes the new member states (Zaidi et al, 2006), but there remains no equivalent literature on older people in Central Asia.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Jane Falkingham: orcid.org/0000-0002-7135-5875

ORCID for Maria Evandrou: orcid.org/0000-0002-2115-9358

Catalogue record

Export record