The new economic system brought along with it a completely new and different
system of stratification as compared to that of the former Socialist country. The old
Socialist hierarchies were replaced by the new social stratification structure. The study of the change in the social stratification system and the impact of the shift from a socialist society to a market economy on individual strategies for social and economic mobility has received less attention from researchers than the study of macroeconomic changes in the country and of structural determinants of the decline of the standard of living.However, some attention to this dimension of change was paid in the studies of the changing nature of the labor market (Brainerd 1998; Gerber and Hout 1998; Gerber 2002).