Social Development and Regional Disparities in the Rural Areas of Romania: Focus on the Social Disadvantaged Areas
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Social Development and Regional Disparities in the Rural Areas of Romania: Focus on the Social Disadvantaged Areas Bianca Mitrică1 · Paul Şerban1 · Irena Mocanu1 · Ines Grigorescu2 · Nicoleta Damian2 · Monica Dumitraşcu3 Accepted: 15 June 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Currently, Romania’s rural area is undergoing a restructuring process (demographic, economic, social) acquiring new dimensions and characteristics. In the current paper we focus on the social characteristics of the rural area of Romania, as a consequence of the economic restructuring. Its aim is to identify the current patterns of social development and their territorial inequalities at a micro-scale level by assessing the levels of social development based on a Social Disadvantage Index (SDI). The indicators used for SDI include unemployment, employment in agriculture, dwellings quality, education, health. The results show that the deeply social disadvantaged rural areas are located in the north-eastern, south-eastern, south and south-western parts of Romania. The territorial continuity of these areas is interrupted by the presence of some metropolitan areas (Iaşi, Galaţi-Brăila, Constanţa, Bucharest, Piteşti, Ploieşti, Craiova). The rural settlements located in the central and western parts of Romania register some of the lowest SDI values being concentrated in counties well known for the very low degree of socio-economic development: Vaslui, Dolj, Olt and Teleorman. The research is in line with Romania’s Territorial Development Strategy which aims to ensure an integrated strategic planning to guide the national territorial development processes. Keywords Social development · Disadvantaged areas · Social Disadvantage Index (SDI) · Regional disparities · Rural · Romania
1 Introduction Over the decades, social and economic decline in rural areas has intensified, especially in Central and Eastern European countries (Pašakarnis and Maliene 2010) since the different levels of development here lag significantly behind those in the Western countries (Bański 2009), thus heightening the east–west divide. Broadly, rural areas are characterised by different levels of socio-economic development with spatial differentiations, from dynamic in the environs of big cities (in suburban areas) to underdeveloped far from urban * Irena Mocanu [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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agglomerations and in peripheries (Bański 2005). The pattern of uneven development in rural areas is mainly triggered by the differences related to capital and labour flows, types of economic activities, interests of various actors and factors related to location, distance and environment (Sofer and Applebaum 2012). The social development process can be assimilated to a systematic effort to solve the social problems based on two structural components: an "objective-status" to be reached and a set of actions aimed at meeting the "objective-status" (Zamfir 2017). The direct link betw
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