Barkley, I don't know where I got the figure of 15 to 1 for the income differential after the war, but it appears you are correct and I was wrong. However, I was also wrong in that differentials did not widen later in the 80s unless in the second half of the decade as a consequence of the economic crisis brought on by the IMF as described by Chossodovsky. The figures I have here at home are: 1947 3.1/1 1955 7.2/1 1973 6.3/1 1983 5.7/1 That is, after the adoption of self-management, differentials appear to have slowly decreased. (by the way the figures for 1947 and 1973 are from Horvat, The Yugoslav Economic System; the figures for 1955 and 1983 are from the Yugoslav Statistical Yearbook. I was trying to find the comparable figure for 1987 among some photocopies of Yugoslav data I have, but couldn't find it. What I did find, however, was another series which paints a quite different figure. In 1986, the ratio of net personal income per worker (cist licni dohodak po radniku) between Slovenia and Kosovo was only around 2/1, less than half the difference than national income per capita. I would think that there are probably two main reasons for this discrepancy -- the very high birth rate among the Albanians in Kosovo which produced a very large dependency ratio (i.e. a low LF/Pop ratio); and secondly, a low female participation rate given the social pressures among the Islamic population to keep their women out of the labour force and home raising children. It may also reflect the way figures are collected undercounting output in kind in the peasant sector which is still very large in Kosovo. Paul Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba
[PEN-L:4615] Slovenia /Kosovo Incomes
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Sun, 28 Mar 1999 11:35:06 -0600
