Ave Roots

This chapter analyses the social protection system in Estonia mainly from the immigration viewpoint. Perhaps because of low immigration rates in recent decades, immigration and emigration issues are seldom explicitly regulated in the Estonian legal system. Our findings indicate that social security rights are based mostly on legal resident status in Estonia, although EU foreign residents sometimes benefit from some better conditions, mainly in terms of taking into account employment records in other EU countries. Missing waiting periods for entitlement to social benefits guarantee that newly arrived immigrants have similar rights with long-term residents.

Public satisfaction with healthcare systems is an important dimension of healthcare legitimacy. The paper analyzes how satisfaction with healthcare systems depended upon the economic situation of our respondents during and after the economic recession in the Baltic states. The results show that there were no differences in public satisfaction with healthcare between better and worse off people in Estonia (except in 2009). In Lithuania, however, satisfaction among the economically better off was higher compared to other groups between 2008 and 2014. In Latvia, inequality in satisfaction between groups in different economic situations became significant from 2010.

The collapse of the socialist system, designed to be as an alternative to a market-based system, created a natural historical experiment. The countries engaged in this experiment devised various ways to introduce and develop a market-based society. In a previous article [Titma and Roots (2006): European Societies 8, 493–526], we examined intragenerational mobility in the first stage of the transition (1991–1997) using cross-national data on five post-Soviet countries obtained from the ‘Paths of a Generation’ (PG) project. In this article, we investigate patterns of intragenerational mobility and factors facilitating it in the second period of the transition (1998–2004). We focus especially on gender as an important factor in intragenerational mobility. We expected that the extent of mobility would decline as the labour market becomes more institutionally regulated. Surprisingly, we find that intragenerational mobility in Estonia is even higher in the second period of transition than in the first period. While men were advantaged relative to women in the first period of the transition, we find that women were more successful than men in gaining positions in the upper strata and in white-collar positions in the second stage of the transition.

Following our previous research, we argue that weak societal institutions allow human agency factors to influence human behaviour strongly and, in particular, to affect how people coped with the collapse of Soviet institutions and responded to new opportunities that arose in the transition from communism. We chose Estonia as our study site because it had a “bottom‐up” transition that encouraged individual initiative and mass participation. Further, its state rapidly developed efficient, democratic institutions and legalized private ownership, which reorganized economic activity. Human agency factors include pre‐conditions (e.g., skills, education, goals), processes (e.g., making choices and factors affecting choices, such as self‐efficacy and locus of control), and previous agentic actions. We examined the impacts of adolescent abilities and goals, completed education, and economic activities in the first stage of the transition on economic success in the second stage using longitudinal data from the Paths of a Generation study. Respondents were interviewed around age 18 (in 1983) and again around ages 23 (in 1988), 28 (in 1993), 32 (in 1997), and 39 (in 2004). As hypothesized, we found evidence that adolescents' abilities affected both income in 2004 and income mobility between 1997 and 2004. Additional education completed after adolescence and economic activities reflecting individual initiative in the first stage of the transition also promoted economic success. Surprisingly, adolescent agency had noteworthy effects on the economic success of adults who were almost 40 years old and who had been reared and educated in a communist society with strikingly different institutions, norms, and values than those in Estonia in 2004.

After the collapse of the USSR, the post-Soviet states chose different strategies to build up their economy and society. In our research, we use data of young adults in five countries that represent these strategies. Baltic countries, Estonia and Latvia, are the examples of ‘bottom up’ shock therapy which opened opportunities to everybody and therefore everybody was engaged. Belarus is an example of a country with a still ongoing command economy with very few changes to the market in the late 1990s. The Russian region, Sverdlovsk, and the Ukraine region, Kharkov, are examples of ‘top-down’ privatisation and still shrinking economy in the late 1990s. We hypothesize that different paths of transition influenced intragenerational mobility patterns for young adults. We estimate the impact of respondents’ gender, education, income, economic sector and the characteristics of parental background on intragenerational mobility. We found that Belarus differed from other regions, as young adults there were the least mobile, and the chosen factors had very little explanatory power in the analysis of intragenerational mobility. In the Baltic countries, intragenerational mobility was well explained by typical factors of mobility in a market society. Seven years of transition to the market is too short a time to make statements about long-term trends, but we can still investigate three major strategies to the market and predictability of intragenerational mobility.