Economic and Social Policies to Combat Poverty in Romania in the Last Century

Between 1918 and 2018, Romania experienced a century of great social turmoil, being heavily affected by the human and material losses produced by the two world wars, on a social background already marked by the phenomenon of poverty on a broad social scale. The two world wars deepened massively and in the long run, all the gaps in Romania's development towards Western European countries. Even the succession of different political regimes (liberal, peasant, communist, social democrat, etc.) has not helped much - compared to what happened in the other European countries - in the sense of diminishing the phenomenon of poverty. Throughout this period, poverty on a large social scale (especially in rural areas) has been a constant of social life in Romania, despite all measures to combat it. The concrete situation of the social impact of poverty at each of the historical stages, as well as the concrete interventions of the Romanian state and society, in order to restrict the area of manifestation of this phenomenon will be presented in the following lines.