KALAMAZOO, Mich.—A new study reconsiders and ultimately rejects the well-publicized claim in Lancet that privatization caused a drastic increase in premature deaths in ex-Soviet countries after the fall of communism. The new research, carried out by social scientists at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, shows that the reported correlation between adult male mortality and measures of enterprise privatization across former Soviet states is a statistical artifact of particular assumptions in the 2009 Lancet article.

The Lancet article's claim was widely reported around the world and seemed to confirm suspicions of privatization's negative social effects. The "pathway" by which privatization supposedly raised mortality was through job loss, leading to ill health and premature death. But the study by the American researchers finds no evidence that privatization resulted in rises of either mortality or unemployment.

The new analysis examines three simple checks that were made on the assumptions of the Lancet article: recomputing the measure of mass privatization, assuming a short lag for economic policies to affect mortality, and controlling for country-specific mortality trends. Any one of these changes greatly weakens the mortality-privatization correlation, and any two produce a correlation that is either zero or negative.

The American study also analyzes data on Russian regions, and the results again show there is no evidence that privatization increased mortality during the early 1990s. Finally, reanalysis of the relationship between privatization and unemployment in post-communist countries shows that there is little support for the Lancet article's proposed pathway by which privatization might have caused unnecessary deaths.

"Mass Privatisation and the Post-Communist Mortality Crisis: Is There Really a Relationship?" (by John S. Earle and Scott Gehlbach) can be accessed at the Upjohn Institute Web site at http://www.upjohn.org/mortality. A summary published in Lancet is available at the same source.

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Founded in 1945, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research is a non-partisan, not-for-profit research organization dedicated to finding, evaluating, and promoting solutions to employment-related problems. For more information about the Institute visit us at http://www.upjohninstitute.org.