The preferences for economic growth in the post-Soviet countries. A multicounty study

Abstract

Although economic growth is always one of the priorities for a country, an ever-growing economy is unsustainable in the long run. Environment protection, public participation in decision-making, and, nowadays, even strong defense forces gain increasing importance for country sustainability. The paper studies trade-offs between national goals as impacted by the population values and attitudes in the post-soviet region. We study a representative dataset from eleven countries (N=20006, age 18+, M ± SD: 46,04 ± 17,07; 58% women, 46,8% upper education). Two indicators are utilized to determine the preferences for economic growth – the growth as the most important priority (the other three being military spending, public participation in social life, and aesthetics of city and countryside) and economic growth at the expense of environmental protection. Methodologically, we rely on correlations and confidence intervals for mean values (95%) analyses to study the associations and the country differences in preferences for economic growth. The results suggest that (1) post-Soviet countries are largely heterogeneous in their preference for economic growth as compared to other priorities, and geographically close countries may have opposing attitudes, and (2) the country-level correlations of the two indicators of preferences for economic growth produced opposite statistically significant correlations in different countries.