Mihaela Geor­giana OPREA 1 , Car­men Adri­ana GHEORGHE 1 , Mihaela Irma VLĂDESCU 1
CENTER OF DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH “VLADIMIR TREBICI”, NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ECONOMIC RESEARCH “COSTIN C. KIRIŢESCU” (NIER); SCHOOL OF ADVANCED STUDIES OF THE ROMANIAN ACADEMY (SCOSAAR)
Cor­re­spond­ing author e‑mail: mihaela.vladescu@ince.ro
Abstract: Accord­ing to the pos­si­bil­i­ties offered by the exist­ing resources, rur­al devel­op­ment in Roma­nia is still dif­fi­cult to achieve. The eco­nom­ic-social gaps between the urban and rur­al areas are among the high­est in the EU and rel­a­tive­ly at the same ampli­tude for many years. The recent peri­od, marked by mul­ti­ple crises (of a san­i­tary, eco­nom­ic and social nature) has shown that the devel­op­ment of the rur­al area is reduced, on the one hand due to the eco­nom­ic struc­ture and labor resources inad­e­quate to changes and shocks, and on the oth­er hand due to income inequal­i­ty, respec­tive­ly of the low remu­ner­a­tion in agri­cul­ture, com­pared to non-agri­cul­tur­al activ­i­ties. The demo­graph­ic devel­op­ments in recent years, rel­a­tive­ly con­tra­dic­to­ry, flows of young pop­u­la­tion to cer­tain local­i­ties in the rur­al areas, simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with a more pro­nounced aging in many oth­er rur­al areas, require dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed poli­cies and pro­grams for each area depend­ing on the spe­cif­ic local demo­graph­ics. The lack of an approach adapt­ed to local demo­graph­ic devel­op­ments reduced the effec­tive­ness of rur­al devel­op­ment pro­grams. The study will high­light the depen­dence of demo­graph­ic devel­op­ments in rur­al areas on the lev­el of devel­op­ment; in the rur­al envi­ron­ment of the less devel­oped coun­ties, the aging of the pop­u­la­tion is accen­tu­at­ed by the emi­gra­tion of young peo­ple. The more devel­oped areas ben­e­fit from an influx made up most­ly of the young pop­u­la­tion who have migrat­ed from the urban envi­ron­ment and con­tribute to the devel­op­ment of the adopt­ed local­i­ties. After 2015 the rate of inter­nal migra­tion from urban to rur­al was high in rela­tion to the flow between rur­al and urban. For exam­ple, in 2020, the peak pan­dem­ic year, the migra­tion rate from urban to rur­al was 12.1 per 1000 inhab­i­tants com­pared to only 6.2 per 1000 inhab­i­tants the migra­tion rate from rur­al to urban. The study also high­lights the cor­re­la­tion between the specifics of demo­graph­ic devel­op­ments and progress in the employ­ment of rur­al labor resource. In this con­text, we under­line the fact that the incomes of rur­al house­holds were around 62% of the aver­age income per per­son in urban house­holds.
Key­words: rur­al devel­op­ment, gaps, demo­graph­ic devel­op­ments, income, labor force.
JEL clas­si­fi­ca­tion: J60, O13, R11, R21

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