We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989-90. The results, based on micro data from the 1985-92 Household Budget Surveys, indicate that overall income inequality increased during the initial...