HOUSING CONDITIONS IN THE ROMANIAN RURAL HOUSEHOLD

Lore­na Flo­renti­na CHIȚEA
INSTITUTE OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS – INCE-AR NIER-ROMANIAN ACADEMY
Cor­re­spond­ing author e‑mail: chitu_lorena @ yahoo.com
Abstract: Liv­ing con­di­tions in the rur­al area are pre­car­i­ous in Roma­nia, our coun­try being at the bot­tom of the Euro­pean rank­ing, and the sit­u­a­tion is get­ting worse as the degree of iso­la­tion increas­es (main­ly in the hilly and moun­tain areas) com­bined with the pre­car­i­ous­ness of liveli­hood resources in these areas (extreme­ly low pos­si­bil­i­ties of income-gain­ing employ­ment, as well as with poor cov­er­age of social ser­vices (edu­ca­tion, health­care and social assis­tance ser­vices, etc.). The hous­ing con­di­tions in the Roman­ian rur­al house­hold reveal a series of dis­par­i­ties, the most obvi­ous being the rur­al / urban divide, as well as the dis­par­i­ties exist­ing between dif­fer­ent rur­al areas. The main hypoth­e­sis of the paper is the fol­low­ing: there is a strong link between the hous­ing con­di­tions and the devel­op­ment lev­el in the rur­al area, as well as the rural­i­ty lev­el. From the method­olog­i­cal point of view, the first stage of the study was the selec­tion of hous­ing indi­ca­tors, fol­lowed by the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the cor­re­la­tion between these indi­ca­tors and the degree of rural­i­ty at coun­ty lev­el, in the peri­od 2007–2020. The results reveal a strong­ly sig­nif­i­cant cor­re­la­tion between the liv­ing con­di­tions and the degree of rural­i­ty, the impor­tant cities func­tion­ing as a growth and devel­op­ment pole for the rur­al areas in their prox­im­i­ty, with ben­e­fi­cial effects on the hous­ing con­di­tions (mod­ern­iza­tion of dwellings and easy access to util­i­ties).
Key words: rur­al-urban divide, rur­al dwelling, liv­ing con­di­tions, hous­ing strate­gies
JEL Clas­si­fi­ca­tion: R00, R210, I310