Development and Poverty in the Romanian Villages, in Sociologie Românească / Romanian Sociology Annual English Electronic Edition, Issue 1 (1999), pp. 188-212 (original) (raw)

How to get to a poor village: the sociological way, Sociologie Românească / Romanian Sociology Annual English Electronic Edition Issue 3 (2001), pp. 89-106

The paper is devoted to a comparative analysis of two scales for measuring poverty at village level. The discussion is focused on the grid for poverty measurement in the practice of Romanian Social Development Fund to target poverty alleviation. The analysis points out the fact that, in the last three years the grid functioned effectively to identify poor villages and implicitly to implement of poverty alleviation at community level. The kind of poverty targeted by the grid is particularly associated with distance items (village location versus commune center, versus nearest town, modernized roads, county chef-lieu etc.). The study assesses the grid from the point of view of measuring village poverty in different geographical areas. Comparing grid measurement of village poverty with another measure based on estimations of different types of capital (human, social, material, vital, cultural) results that the RSDF tool is has a rather poor ability to cope with difference in poverty associated with mountain-plain differences. The final part of the paper makes clear the relations among household poverty, rural community poverty and physical environment. The causal profile for different types of consumptions at the household level are showed to be significantly different and with consequences for development policies.

Community and regional poverty in rural Romania, 1999

Romanian Journal of Sociology, 1999

Poverty is largely analyzed at individual or household level.Its measurement at • community and regional levels are much less elaborated but such an approach could '•^ be of high relevance for public action policies. The paper presents the first standardized approach of community poverty as applied at commune level in România. ' ' .

Local Human Development of Rural Places in Romania: A Community Capitals Framework

Romanian Journal of Population Studies, XVI, 1, 2022

The article aims to understand human development at the level of the communes in Romania. The context of development is given by the community capitals associated with the population, the urban region, the cultural area, the natural environment, and the historical conditioning of development. The main dependent variable is measured both quantitatively by the local human development index and qualitatively by a typology of local development. The results of multiple regression analyses that have operated with both types of measurements of the dependent variable are complementary and contribute to the validation of the research and the generation of new hypotheses or research questions.

Analysis of local development in Romanian and Hungarian villages

2019

Over the last decade we have been conducting research activities in many village research camps and accumulating knowledge about the development of different villages. There is a gradually strengthening assumption that the development possibilities in the analysed villages will be affected significantly by the condition of the local society. In the study, we primarily focused on the experiences gained in the Romanian and Hungarian village research camps, where we were studing the local society and the history of development of thevillages. The main question was whether their development was determined by strategy, good luck and good position, or by the quality of the local society. Thefollowing methods were used during the research: processing and analysis of data available at the site and in databases, questionnaire surveys, interviews and participant observations. In case of statistical data, we relied primarily on the applications of the National Spatial Development and Territori...

Defining and Assessing Local Human Development in Romania (2016)

The chapter explores the diversity of Romanian small settlements from the point of view of their development. Human development of a village or of a town sublocality is given by its community capital in terms of stocks of education, employment, working age population, mobility experience of its population and housing. This is a comprehensive view at small spaces areas, in line with the approach from Human Development Index of UNDP , multiple deprivation index in UK and some Romanian applications at census track or village level . See citation specifications on the first page of this pre-print.

MAPPING DEPRIVATION IN RURAL AREAS FROM TRANSYLVANIA: REFLECTIONS ON A METHODOLOGICAL EXERCISE

The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on consequences of uneven development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties located in the historical region of Transylvania. It presents the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators, the construction of composite indexes and the profiles of localities according to their values. We explore the statistical correlations between our indexes and the poverty rates measured for 2002 (CASPIS, 2004), as well as the Local Human Development Index proposed by Sandu (2011) and revised by the World Bank (2014). Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements, but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the entire administrative unit. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our data reveals that, after controlling for poverty and local resources, the share of the Roma ethnic minority is a strong statistical predictor of registered unemployment, however, it does not correlate with the frequency of granting social assistance benefits. Introduction 4 The aim of the present paper is to present and critically discuss the potentialities and limits of using official data (collected and reported by state-institutions) in order to shed light on unequal development and measure area deprivation in present-day Romania. We present the reasons for choosing certain statistical indicators that local authorities regularly (yet not publicly) report at the level of localities, the construction of composite indexes based on these indicators and the profiles of rural communes (administrative unites comprising one or several villages) and small-towns (with less than 20,000 inhabitants) according to these indexes 5. Unlike other poverty-mapping inquiries, our goal was not to identify compact, segregated and severely impoverished settlements (Sandu, 2005; Fleck and Rughiniș, 2008; Vincze, 2013; Vincze and Hossu, 2014), but to measure the extent of material deprivation at the level of the administrative unit as a whole. In this way, we refrained from seeing poverty as the problem of a socially (and sometimes spatially) marginalized settlement, and instead defined poverty as a problem of the entire local community, that should be addressed by the local community as a whole. Our argumentation is based on a quantitative inquiry at the level of rural communes and small-towns from three counties from Transylvania, situated in the central part of Romania and partly corresponding to the historical region of Szeklerland (Székelyföld in Hungarian and Ținutul Secuiesc in Romanian): Mureș (Maros), Harghita (Hargita) and Covasna (Kovászna). Although in terms of ethnic distribution these three counties have a specific profile, with considerably larger shares of the Hungarian population 6 , in terms of economic and labour force indicators they largely resemble the central-region of the country and Romania

A methodology for assessing poverty in Moldavia (Romania)

Revista de geografía Norte Grande, 2014

Community poverty, analyzed as the sum of several types of social and territorial deprivation, is the geographical expression of various processes and phenomena, commonly the object of sociological and economic studies. In this paper we performed a statistical compaction of a series of synthetic indicators, generating an indicator called the index of community development. The statistical validation of these results is accompanied by a spatial validation, which identifi es the legitimate social structures in rural areas, emphasizing that obtaining valid results in the implementation of territorial development strategies depends more on the consistency of the scientifi c methods used to interpret statistical analysis.