for a perception of performance related to a local comparison group, we took a variable asking for the perceived performance compared to colleagues in 1989.

**Employment histories were constructed by taking advantage of the information collected on job market performance for each year between 1989 and 2006.** The second section contains an extensive set of questions about life events and labor market history since 1989 to 2006, year by year. Unemployment may have been underreported, since working at least one part of the year is enough to consider the year as employed. If more than one position was held during one year, they are all reported in different cells. This information is used to construct the labor history of the interviewed person, including time worked in the public or private sector and number of different jobs held in this time.  We restricted the information to the years when the interviewed person was between 18 and 65 years old.<sup>5</sup>

**We also took advantage of the information on labor histories to construct a measure of public employment for every year between 1989 and 2006.** Using the information on enterprise ownership, we were able to obtain the share of employment, excluding public administration, corresponding to the public sector. As can be expected, this share was considerably high in 1989 (with the exception of Turkey), and has fallen dramatically for most countries by 2006.

**The data at the national level was obtained from the World Development Indicators database (World Bank 2013)** . We used GDP per capita in real terms, Gini coefficients, and the ratio of the share of income the top 20% and the bottom 20%. In many cases the data for the years 1989 and 2006 was not available, so we replaced for the closest year available, with up to three years of difference.

# **4. Perceptions of Economic Mobility and Their Correlates**

**a) What are the perceptions of economic mobility observed in ECA?**

**A substantial share of households in the region perceives that their standards of living have fallen compared to 1989.** In 2006, around 50% of households in the region declared that they saw their countries in worse economic standing than in 1989. Moreover, when asked about the specific situation of the household in the same period of time, again, around 50% of the households declared a worsening in their economic situation (Figure 3).

**The perceived fall in living standards is consistent across all sub-regions.** Only households in Central Asian countries perceive in majority that their countries are doing better than in 1989 (Figure 3). This is indeed a region in which GDP per capita was almost 15 percent higher over the period. For all the other sub-regions – even the best performers in terms of GDP growth - the prevalent view is of a worsening of the national economic conditions, peaking at almost 70% in the Western Balkans. About the conditions of the household interviewed, the results are similar, and even more dramatic. On average, people across all regions consider that their household is doing worse than in 1989, ranging from 41% in New EU Member States (again, one of the best performing regions) to almost 60% in the Western Balkans.

> 5 We considered Out of Labor Force the cases with no employment information between 1989 and 2006, or decided not to work, or declared are officially retired & not worked & were at least 55 for women and 60 for men, or declared left job because of retirement and never worked again or declared studying and not working. We considered employed if worked for wages or self‐employed. Finally, we considered unemployed if received unemployment benefits and did not working, or if it was part of the Labor Force, and did not have a job.

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