Mapping Deprivation in Rural Areas from Transylvania: Reflections on a Methodological Exercise

Abstract

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.

Livelihood Strategies during the COVID-19 Epidemic in Materially Disadvantaged Roma Communities from Covasna County, Romania

“…The study of Roma disadvantages using qualitative methods has been the subject of several anthropological monographs (Engebrigtsen 2007;Fosztó 2009;Olivera 2012;Szeman 2017;Racleş 2021). There have also been studies using a complex methodology, combining the sociological survey method with anthropological fieldwork in an attempt to complement the survey data obtained with questionnaires with qualitative data and interpretations (Bădescu et al 2007;Fleck and Rughinis , 2008;Cace et al 2010;Toma et al 2017;Toma and Fosztó 2018).…”