Family Futures

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onfronting

amily

overty

Families with no wage, with one or two unemployment

benefits and excluded temporarily or chronically from the

economic system, are confronted with severe poverty.

Dwelling in the countryside might provide some sources of

food and some conditions to cope easier with the shortcom-

ings. The existence of small agricultural plots, but the lack of

necessary means to carry out agriculture, provides conditions

of subsistence but in chronic poverty.

Migration to work abroad, particularly if it is illegal,

provides an answer to the imperatives of the moment, but

exposes the immigrants to a lack of social and health insur-

ances. Furthermore, a segment of the immigrants is confronted

with illegal and degrading activities.

Young people lack personal resources, as unemployment

among the young is high. In this case, the traditional support

of the family is an essential condition for everyday living. The

impoverishment of the adult generation, and of the elderly in

particular, decreases the support for the young. Poverty among

young people has been studied less than other sectors of society.

Victims of the current crisis include employees with average

or higher wages and pensioners, who benefited from the

stability of the pensions system and who took out loans. These

people are now confronted with poverty: decrease of incomes,

wage cuts and the risk of sickness. The phenomenon reaches

practically all the age categories, with real estate loans or loans

for personal needs taken to meet minimal, decent dwelling

conditions or consumption needs.

The numbers are supplemented by the victims of swindling

activities not protected by the police/legal system, such as

thefts, loans with usury (the only available loans when there

is no stable income in the family) and the loss of dwellings by

retrocession or deceit.

For modern societies, particularly for the EU, poverty is not

a problem of the people. Rather, it is a problem of the entire

community. It is an illusion to think that poverty is a state

produced exclusively by the economy. For the EU, the social

aspect is also an important direction of policy.

In 2010 the Nobel laureate for economy, Paul Krugman,

showed that in some economic analyses, Europe was often

used as negative example to support the thesis that if you try to

make the economy less brutal and to protect the citizens better

when they are cornered, you end by smothering economic

progress.

This conception is totally wrong, according to

Krugman, with the European experience showing exactly the

opposite: that social policy and progress can coexist.

In the EU, social transfers contribute to the reduction of

relative poverty, on average by 60 per cent. Therefore, more

than half of the people at risk of poverty due to economic

activity leave the risk area due to the social protection poli-

cies. The efficiency of social transfers to reduce poverty was

highest in Hungary, France, Sweden and Austria, with reduc-

tions in excess of 70 per cent.

The efficiency of the anti-poverty policy in Romania, with

the same structure, is below the European average in a year

when the effect of alleviating poverty by social protection,

at the national level, increased compared to previous years.

During the past three years relative poverty decreased in

Romania, while poverty resulting from productive activ-

ity (pre-transfer) increased. Pensions played a progressive

compensating role in the alleviation of poverty (two to three

times higher than all the other social services together).

In 1997 the Romanian Presidency adopted an anti-poverty

strategy which has been, nevertheless, ignored by the

Government and was not transformed into a governmental

project. A better attempt in this direction was made only in

2001 by the construction of a national system: the Commission

on Anti-poverty and for the Promotion of Social Inclusion

(CASPIS), the County Commissions on Anti-poverty and

for the Promotion of Social Inclusion, and the Government’s

decision to adopt the National Plan on Anti-poverty and for

the Promotion of Social Inclusion (PNA-inc). In 2004, as a

condition for accession to the EU, CASPIS developed the Joint

Inclusion Memorandum. This was adopted by the Government

of Romania, approved in 2005 by the European Commission

and signed as a commitment by the Government of Romania

towards the European Commission during the pre-accession

process.

With this, the narrower objective of reducing poverty

has been included in a wider social policy to promote inclusion

in all the spheres of social life. The expansion has been stimu-

lated by the European context, which has introduced the new

concept of social inclusion as a core concept of social policy.

The institutional structure, the anti-poverty programmes

and the programmes for the promotion of social inclusion,

which had started to function and to be applied, were aban-

doned in 2005 when the governance changed. The governance

of 2009-2011 stressed this negative trend, launching an attack

on the social functions of the state and taking practical meas-

ures to withdraw the state from social support. Paradoxically

in 2010 – the year which the European Commission declared

as the European Year for the Fight Against Poverty and Social

Exclusion – the governing strategy ran contrary to these

priorities by promoting hard measures of austerity, obsessively

invoking the reduction of social expenditure as a precondition

of escaping the crisis.

Poverty affects all social groups in Romania, to varying yet significant degrees

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