Situația sărăciei din România în context internațional, în anul 2013

Abstract

The article presents an overall view on the recent evolutions of the poverty phenomenon world wide, in European Union and in Romania. The quoted studies and the used sources of data are extremely diverse, coming from publications of FAO, UNICEF, UN, EUROSTAT, The National Institute for Statistics, but also from publications of the Research Institute for Quality of Life, from The Romanian Academy. In the world, there are many ways of assessing and talking about the poverty phenomenon. Extremely competent and reliable institutions have gained prestige in this respect. On the other hand, the social action and the policies of other institutions, as World Bank and IMF, are extremely controversial. Often, (the identity of) the one who expresses, at one time, a certain attitude towards the incidence of poverty or represents a certain institution in the action of poverty mitigation, equally shows the degree and way of implication and the consequences of changing the social reality. Along with the rich documentary material, signed by institutions and specialists in social research from inside and outside the country, the article also uses information coming from the study of the phenomenon of poverty in Romania conducted within the Research Institute for Quality of Life from Bucharest. There are presented the latest developments of the dynamics of the relationships established between the various categories of income levels of the population (minimum wage, average wage, different categories of pensions) and the minimum decent livelihood, respectively the subsistence minimum, for the main types of families in Romania (family with children, family of retirees), per residential areas. The main ideas coming from this article are derived from the unprecedented polarization of income and consumption of goods and services of the population, at global, European and national level. In the context, there are also analyzed the main factors that have contributed to the increasing incidence of poverty at national level, as well as the policies of systematic undermining of the national economy, the deficient policies concerning employment and income, the increasing socio-economic inequalities, due to the redistribution and social protection policies, often unfair and inadequate, the policies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which seems to act towards the expansion of poverty. The dramatic situation of poverty in today's world can hardly be described with detachment, in scientific terms. Yet, we shall try such an approach further on. The world, however, speaks for itself... about the critical degree of civilization of the nowadays humanity, about the incoherence, the rhetorical, if not demagogic, character, and the lack of moral consistency of the 21st century’s mankind. World Bank data shows that, at the level of 2005, 80% of the humanity was living on less than $ 10 per day and 3.1 billion people were living on less than $ 2.5 a da. The total number of children worldwide was 2.2 billion. Of these, approximately l billion were living in poverty, 640 million (1 in 3) had no shelter, 400 million (1 of 5) were lacking access to safe water sources, 270 million (1 in 7) were lacking access to health services and 121 million were lacking access to education services. In Romania too, the families with children are those who have the most difficult socio-economic situation, many of them living on the mercy of social assistance.