Poverty in Romania during 1945-1989

Abstract

This study aims to identify the manifestation of poverty in Romania during the socialist period. We used various relevant data, even though often indirect (not referring explicitly to the phenomenon of poverty), information and indicators published by the national and international statistics of the time, as well as studies and papers by contemporary Romanian economists and sociologists (as Axenciuc, Pasti, etc.). In pursuing our objective of surveying the phenomenon of poverty during the socialist period, we monitored three large periods, in which the dominant causes of the phenomenon were somehow different: period 1945-1972, dominated by the efforts of paying the debts of war and of national implementation of a policy of nationalization and of change of the forms of property; period 1973-1979, dominated by the massive social effort for industrialization; the cooperativization of agriculture, concluded in 1962 and the total servitude of the intensive work in the rural, were used massively to generate the resources needed for the technical support of the process of industrialization; period 1980-1989, when the access of the bulk of population to consumer goods and services became extremely precarious, on the background of the effort of paying the debts Romania contracted for industrialization; the establishment of a political-economical quasi-elite, with privileged access to consumer goods and services stressed further the polarization of the access to basic foods.