Was post-communist mass privatisation a serial killer?

Dr Christopher Gerry explains why and how a UCL team re-examined evidence for the controversial claim that rapid economic reforms in 1990s post-Communist Europe led to the deaths of thousands. The claim has been hotly debated in the pages of the Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and elsewhere, ever since the 2009 claim, published in the Lancet, that rapid mass privatisation had resulted in large increases in mortality among working aged males. Like many regional specialists, Professor Tomasz Mickiewicz, Zlatko Nikoloski and myself (all based at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies) were surprised by the claims that mass privatisation was to blame for the huge rise in mortality that followed the collapse of Communism in some countries of Eastern Europe. We studied the work carefully; and quickly decided that it merited further investigation. In our recent, peer-reviewed Lancet article, we found that there is no evidence in the available data to support the earlier findings. My colleagues and I used the exact same data to recreate the original results before uncovering, step by step, a series of measurement errors and shortcuts in procedure that resulted in the unjustified claims. The new study argues that, where mass privatisation was implemented, male mortality rates had long since been increasing.