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Two-Tiered Romanian Family Policy and Inequality

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Family Policy and the Organisation of Childcare

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Abstract

By building on the argument that family policies are perhaps the most influential social policy instruments for the organisation of young children’s routine care, this chapter reviews the range of policy instruments geared towards families with young children in place between 2006 and 2015 in the Romanian context. Following a brief discussion of family policy change over the last five decades, the first section provides a concise demographic overview of Romanian families with young children. The chapter then moves on to critically present family policy provisions for families with children under age three, specifically cash benefits, paid leave provisions and early childhood education and care services, commenting on the direction of policy changes during the period studied. This is followed by a similarly structured discussion of provisions for families with children of preschool age. The chapter concludes that the assemblage of family policy instruments in Romania is marred by a host of institutional and structural inconsistencies and gaps, leading to selective social rights, patchy coverage and, consequently, multiple inequalities of access.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Social class is a scholarly concept which travels perhaps with even greater difficulty than, for instance, the welfare state or social rights, being deeply rooted not only in longstanding scholarly traditions in the UK or France, for instance, but also particular social and economic histories of particular polities. Furthermore, the jury is still out on whether class distinctions in post-socialist Romania—as in other post-socialist nations—correspond, even in general terms, with those in rich capitalist nations in the Global North, even if social research on Romania making reference to social class has intensified over the last decade (see especially Ban 2015).

  2. 2.

    At 60% of the median income (UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre 2012).

  3. 3.

    Law no. 118/2010.

  4. 4.

    Emergency ordinance no. 148/2005.

  5. 5.

    Ministerial reports do not distinguish between places for babies and toddlers, therefore it is impossible to quantify the ‘beds’ available for babies and places available for toddlers across the country. Stativă and Anghelescu (2004: 13) report, however, that in their sample of nurseries over 75% of children were between 19 and 36 months, suggesting that Romanian nurseries catered especially for working parents who had returned from the two-year parental leave.

  6. 6.

    Law no. 67/1995.

  7. 7.

    Decision no. 1770/2005.

  8. 8.

    Law no. 416/2001, consolidated in 2009.

  9. 9.

    Law no. 482/2006.

  10. 10.

    For a presentation of this programme, see http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22751415.

  11. 11.

    Law no. 125/2015.

  12. 12.

    Though the Romanian Ministry of Labour relies on the median income to establish different poverty thresholds and to report on a host of other social indicators on an annual basis, the Statistical Institute reports on pre- and post-tax average incomes on a monthly basis. As a better estimation of aggregate purchasing power and due to more reliable information, average post-tax incomes are reported as reference for comparing the generosity of cash benefits here.

  13. 13.

    Law no. 119/1997.

  14. 14.

    Decision no. 4/2007.

  15. 15.

    Information on these thresholds are conflicting. While legislation stipulates these comparatively low values, Ministry reports indicate a per capita income threshold of 423 RON for 2008.

  16. 16.

    Law no. 161/2009.

  17. 17.

    Law no. 277/2010.

  18. 18.

    Decision no. 1763/2005.

  19. 19.

    Law no. 277/2010.

  20. 20.

    Emergency ordinance no. 42/2013.

  21. 21.

    Decision no. 1763/2005.

  22. 22.

    Law no. 277/2010.

  23. 23.

    Emergency ordinance no. 42/2013.

  24. 24.

    Decree law no. 31/1990.

  25. 25.

    Emergency ordinance no. 148/2005.

  26. 26.

    Law no. 120.1997

  27. 27.

    In 1997 a ‘Clarification’ (Precizare) stipulated fathers’ right to the leave, but this right was legally formalised only through law no. 19/2000.

  28. 28.

    See Law no. 7/2007.

  29. 29.

    See decision no. 1025/2006.

  30. 30.

    Emergency ordinance no. 148/2005 introduced these changes as a means to “externalise” from social security budgets (i.e. unburden these earmarked funds of) “certain costs”, suggesting that the social right to care for one’s newborn child was not to be financially supported from contributory social security budgets. At the same time, however, parents without contributions to social security budgets were excluded from what became a tax-financed programme, their social right to care for their newborn denied financial support from public resources to which they too contributed, at least in the form of otherwise quite high VAT. It is the funding of this programme which makes its exclusionary character utterly unjust.

  31. 31.

    Decision no. 1682/2008.

  32. 32.

    Law no. 118/2010.

  33. 33.

    Emergency ordinance no. 111/2010.

  34. 34.

    For a useful review, see the Leave Network’s country report for Germany. The 2017 version was accessed on 9 January 2018 at http://www.leavenetwork.org/fileadmin/Leavenetwork/Country_notes/2017/Germany.FINAL.2may.pdf.

  35. 35.

    For a useful review, see the Leave Network’s country report for Hungary. The 2017 version was accessed on 9 January 2018 at http://www.leavenetwork.org/fileadmin/Leavenetwork/Country_notes/2017/Hungary.FINAL.9_may2017.pdf.

  36. 36.

    Later, as a result of court rulings, the first three births.

  37. 37.

    Scrapped by law no. 166/2012.

  38. 38.

    Emergency ordinance no. 111/2010.

  39. 39.

    Emergency ordinance no. 124/2011.

  40. 40.

    Law no. 210/1999.

  41. 41.

    Estimates for private institutions are missing.

  42. 42.

    Law no. 193/2006.

  43. 43.

    The age-related cash benefits and leave provisions marked age three as the threshold for children with disabilities. In other words, families with disabled children were entitled to the more generous universal child allowance and the paid leave scheme until their children’s third birthdays.

  44. 44.

    Of an average 196,680 beneficiaries per month in 2011, 25,237 claimed in 2011 and of these an average 5283 per month were on the shorter leave (Ministry of Labour, Family, Social Protection and Elderly Persons 2012: 50).

  45. 45.

    In late 2015, the Romanian government decided to roll out a pilot programme implemented by a non-profit organisation whereby impoverished families with preschool-aged children would receive a means-tested voucher amounting to 50 RON per month to enable preschool attendance. The voucher is geared towards helping parents cover basic affordances for preschool attendance, including clothing, footwear and supplies. See also European Commission (2016a).

  46. 46.

    This figure is somewhat higher than reported by Ministry documents for the 2014–2015 academic year: an overall enrolment rate of 80.1% (see Ministry of Labour, Family, Social Protection and Elderly Persons 2015: 63–64).

  47. 47.

    Again, the same Ministry report suggests lower enrolment levels: 72% for rural children and 88% for urban children in the three-to-five age group.

  48. 48.

    One of the mechanisms for early school drop-out is regular non-attendance over several academic years. This means that children might be enrolled in school—or preschool—, but fail to attend on a daily basis. Enrolment figures, therefore, overestimate actual reliance on preschool education and care services and, as a result, provide a misleading picture about the defamilialising potential and educational outcomes of services provided.

  49. 49.

    Decision no. 211/2015.

  50. 50.

    Data from internal documents of the County School Inspectorate, obtained from the inspector for Hungarian preschool education, in January 2010.

  51. 51.

    Data for 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 indicated stability in these figures for these localities.

  52. 52.

    Art. 63 of Law no. 1/2011.

  53. 53.

    An independent quality monitoring agency—ARACIP—was set up in 2005. Its primary goal is to ensure minimal quality standards in pre-university education (Kitchen et al. 2017: 47). Though the agency enables access to online reports for individual institutions—including preschools—country-wide, reporting is not systematic and system-level and aggregate data on quality have been lacking. In other words, little is known about variations in quality even within the same locality.

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    Borbála Kovács

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Kovács, B. (2018). Two-Tiered Romanian Family Policy and Inequality. In: Family Policy and the Organisation of Childcare. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78661-2_3

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