Fostering rural transformation in Romania: Entrepreneurship, land reform and institutional changes

Abstract

The article analyses the employment structure in Romania’s rural areas during the post-transition period, focusing on entrepreneurship and public policies designed to support economic development within rural settings. These two mechanisms of economic and social change are explored using official statistics from Eurostat and the National Institute of Statistics, as well as survey data. Particular attention is paid to rural policies adopted due to the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). Since Romania has joined the European Union, CAP has become the core framework for promoting the agricultural sector and implicitly rural development. Rural Romania’s employment structure is no longer dominated by the category of selfemployed people in agriculture and we can notice a general increase of the number and percentage of employees with wages. Building on prior research which revealed the precariousness of the selfemployment in subsistence agriculture and the challenges of integrating these people on the labour market, we emphasize the gradual decrease in absolute and relative terms of this category of selfemployment as a major trend in the rural employment structure. At the same time, the paper contributes to the general debate on entrepreneurship and its transformative effects by looking at the specific profile of Romanian entrepreneurs in agriculture, employing the distinction between opportunity and necessity driven entrepreneurship.