DISTRIBUTIONAL IMPACT OF PRICE CHANGES IN HUNGARY AND THE UNITED-KINGDOM

In Soviet-type economies, commodity prices were distorted as part of t he redistributive system of the state, but with the transition, prices have been liberalised and taxes made more uniform. Has this change ad versely affected the distribution of purchasing power? The paper devel ops a new method of measuring the distributional impact of price chang es by computing the distributional characteristics of commodities from household budget survey data, and applies it to Hungary and the Unite d Kingdom, finding that the distributional impacts over the past decad e were negligible and not significantly different from zero in both ca ses.