A comparison analysis of the ethno-national identity of Hungarian minorities living in Romania, Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine is performed in the paper, including the identifications to majority community and the relationship with Hungary, respectively.According to the empirical results in every country, the community with the pan-Hungarian ethnocultural nation, and the identification with actual Hungary, is less important than regional Hungarianness in the minority identity of Hungarian minority members from outside the borders of Hungary. The primary in-group is the self-minority community in every country. This may be empirically grasped both on the level of the perceptions of social distances and on stereotypes toward Hungarians from Hungary and toward majority populations (Romanians, Slovaks, etc.).

The study is an analysis of national identity and its manifestation in ethnically mixed areas such as Transylvania. The collective identity, and especially the national identity, manifests itself in different modalities according to the social status of the persons, and this aspect has to be kept in view for an adequate analysis of the collective identity. Thematically the analysis comprises some dimensions of the minority national identity of the citizens, such as: the importance of the national belonging in the individual's attitude, and disposition, the criteria of appertaining to the national community, the cognitive and affective connections of the concept of homeland, the perception of the dimensions of their own national group, the national auto- and hetero-stereotypes, the perception of the minority situation and discrimination and their possible identity building (forming) function, the attitude towards the „other" nation, the nature of the regional linkage, the relevance of the national symbols and holidays, national reference persons, a differentiated analysis of some minority and political aspects questions of the historical consciousness, perspectives on social position

Measuring development is a long-standing challenge in the social sciences. Although multidimensional and multivariate approaches to development present several conceptual and/or methodological problems, some studies have pointed out that the unidimensional view of economic progress has failed on a large scale. The main purpose of our article is to elaborate a multidimensional composite index called the PEESH (population, economic, education, social, and health) Development Index, for measuring socio-economic development in Romania with a territorial profile. The PEESH DI index presented in this paper contains five sub-dimensions: population dynamics, economy and labor force, education, social conditions and housing, and health and life conditions, including 22 core indicators. The components of the resulting multidimensional index were weighted using factor analysis and then aggregated transversely into a composite index. Our results show that the differentiated increase of the indicators composing the PEESH DI resulted in a certain restructuring of the development hierarchy of Romania’s counties between 2000 and 2019. These empirical facts strengthen the idea that development cannot be reduced to only economic growth, it comprises an important social dimension as well. Finally, we have strongly argued in this paper that it is time to switch from a single-sided and reductionist perspective of the measurement of regional disparities, within the framework of the Cohesion Policy in the European Union, to a wider and multidimensional perspective, reflecting the complex character of the development process.

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.

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