Cristina Raţ: “Romanian Roma, State Transfers, and Poverty” in International Journal of Sociology, Vol. 35, No. 4, November 2005, pp. 85-137
Romanian Roma, State Transfers, and Poverty[(]
Introduction
“Roma are a unique minority in Europe” – Dena Ringold’s statement, the World Bank expert on Roma issues, at the introductory pages of the 2000 Report on the situation of the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe might be one of the few affirmations about the Roma that European country officials, Roma organizations, international human rights advocacy agencies, scholars of social science, anti-Roma extremists and the Roma themselves would agree upon. The 2005-2015 was declared the Decade for Roma Inclusion[1], and there is an increasing attention towards “the problem of the Roma”, although this often labels only the caricature of poor and uneducated Eastern-European citizens of Romani ethnicity who declare to suffer discrimination in their home countries and seek for asylum or immigrate illegally to the Western part of the European Union. Romania has the largest Roma population[2], and official statistics can hardly estimate the impact of governmental policies on their well-being and social integration.
Looking at the national strategies developed for supporting the Roma in CEE countries, and the numerous studies undertaken on the Roma, one might argue that policymakers are increasingly aware of the manifold dimensions of what is defined as “the Roma problem”, and the limitations of social research in drawing an accurate picture of the situation of the Roma. The conclusions of these investigations commonly highlight that most of the Roma face severe deprivation in terms of income, living conditions, education, political participation, access to health care and social services; moreover, they report a failure of local authorities in securing human and citizenship rights of the Roma, negative prejudices of the majority population often leading to acts of overt discrimination or even ethnic violence.
The Romanian National Strategy for Improving the Situation of the Roma (Romanian Government, 2002) lays the emphasis on institutionalizing the consultancy role of Roma representatives and experts on Roma issues in local governments, promoting Roma culture and civic participation, and affirmative action in education and for labor market integration. The policy measures aimed at improving their living-conditions converge with those designed for combating the risk of poverty and social exclusion for the whole population, and they are stated in the National Action Plan for Social Inclusion (NAPSInc Romania, 2002).
The present paper investigates the effectiveness of policy measures aimed to combat poverty in the case of the Roma from Romania, and tries to answer the question to what extent social transfers reach out the Roma and alleviate their situation of relative disadvantage. It compares the situation of the Roma in 2000 (before the implementation of European social inclusion strategies) with earlier as well as more recent data, assuming the limits emerging from problems of ethnic identification in official statistics and survey data.
Is there a European Approach to Roma poverty and social segregation?
In the context of welfare rights, the European social agenda uses primarily the term categories at risk of poverty and social exclusion, referring to processes of accumulation of disadvantages, a vicious circle of poverty and weakening relations with the rest of the population both in terms of institutional links and informal networks of community support. At the conference “Roma in an Expanding Europe”, hosted by the Hungarian Government in July 2003, European commissioner Diamantopoulou said that
[The EU] … enlargement will bring several million new Roma citizens into the European Union. Roma communities in both current and future Member States continue to face extreme conditions of social exclusion and discrimination. We must bring the full force of EU policies and funding to bear on this problem” (see http://www.welcomeurope.com/news).
The protection of minorities was one of the criteria for EU accession designed at Copenhagen in 1993, and in monitoring the steps undertaken by candidate countries in this direction a special attention had been given to the situation of the Roma[3]. Nevertheless, EU documents hardly report on the situation of the Roma in the EU-15 before the 2004 enlargement and do not offer successful examples of policy design which targeted the Roma in Western Europe.
The proportions and numbers of Roma living in Eastern European countries are undoubtedly larger than those living in Western Europe, and the difficulties they face might be different and, in the opinion of many Roma leaders, more severe. Nevertheless, Roma rights activists[4] consider that the core problems are the same for all Roma groups: discrimination, ethnically (racially?) motivated violence, the lack of political organization and representation, and the fading cultural heritage due to enforced assimilation in majority cultures.
The 2004 Report of the European Commission Directorate General for Employment and Social Affairs draws attention to the lack of “official, publicly available and reliable Roma-specific data of relevance to EU social inclusion and anti-discrimination policy” (EC, 2004: 37), which is regarded as one of the main challenges for policy-design. The European Roma Rights Centre dedicates the whole second issue of their 2004 quarterly to analyzing the causes and consequences of the chronic lack of “ethnic statistics” (Roma Rights Quarterly, 2004).
The European Roma International Office criticized the 2004 EU-Survey on Discrimination and Exclusion in CEE for failing to analyze separately the situation of the Roma minority and consequently ignoring ethnicity as a potential determinant of social exclusion (http://www.erionet.org/Fresh.html, March 2005). They contest the validity of the main conclusion of the report in the case of the Roma, namely that residents of CEE countries do not feel more “excluded” than those from Western Europe[5]. The reply of the authors of the investigation, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (a Commission-funded agency), was that their report has been based on Eurobarometer data, collected upon national representative samples which do not allow statistically significant comparisons between ethnic groups.
Representatives of the European Roma Right Centre draw similar critiques of several European documents on the issue of social inclusion, pointing out that none of the indicators of the risk of poverty and social exclusion (agreed upon at the Laeken European Council) regard discrimination on ethnic grounds, although this might be a strong predictor of socio-economic deprivation; in addition, there are no European guidelines on gathering ethnic data (Cahn, 2004).
The European Union Network of Experts in Fundamental Rights stated that the EU should adopt a Directive aimed specifically at fostering the integration of the Roma (2004: 103). While acknowledging the importance of such a directive, the authors of the 2004 Report on the situation of the Roma in an enlarged EU (EC, 2004) emphasize the limits of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice to impose requirements for positive action. They raise the question whether improving the implementation and enforcement of the current European and national anti-discrimination legislation[6], and creating “a general framework for equal treatment that may benefit all minorities” would be more appropriate than targeting one specific ethnic group (EC, 2004: 45). Nevertheless, they state as the main conclusion of their report that…
… the EU should clearly and explicitly identify Roma within existing and comprehensive anti-discrimination and social inclusion policies, and not simply assume that Roma will be effectively covered by such policies. (EC, 2004: 46).
In the quest to meet the EU accession criteria, most of the candidate countries developed strategies for solving “the Roma problem”, and addressed separately the case of the Roma in their National Action Plans for Social Inclusion (NAPSInc). Only five of the “old” member states did so: Finland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain (EC, 2004: 40). However, Roma organizations often contest the effectiveness of strategic plans developed by candidate or “new” EU countries, which, in their view, aim rather at satisfying EU requirements than addressing the needs of the Roma community[7]. However, the lack of comprehensive statistical data split by ethnicity makes virtually impossible to analyze the impact of state policies on various ethnic groups and prove the existence of indirect discrimination (Cahn, 2004).
The most comprehensive empirical investigations on the Roma from CEE countries were undertaken in 2000 by the Center for Comparative Research of the Sociology Department of the Yale University (lead by Iván Szelényi and involving social scientists from the all countries under study) and by the UNDP together with Regional Bureau for Europe and the Commonwealth of the Independent States (RBEC) in 2000, the latter building on the “capabilities” approach advocated by Sen (1983, 1993). Both studies limit themselves to the CEE region and comparisons are traced between the Roma and majority populations, as well as between the Roma populations living in different post-socialist states included in the study.
Sen’s freedom of choice to achieve one’s agency goals (Sen, 1983; 1993) is also in line with the motto of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (ODIHR-OSCE): acting for the Roma together with the Roma. The Permanent Council of the OSCE adopted in November 2003 the Action Plan for Improving the Situation of Roma and Sinti within the OSCE Area. Their recommendations are based on the principle of assuring the active participation of Roma and Sinti communities “in all decisions that affect their lives” (OSCE, 2003: 12) and state that social policies should build on the conclusions of research reports on the Roma, mentioning those of the UNDP and World Bank.
The World Bank reports (Ringold, 2000; Ringold et.al., 2003; Teşliuc et. al., 2003) build on already existing survey data (in the case of Romania mainly the Yale dataset and the studies of the Institute for Research of the Quality of Life, Bucharest) and their approach is close to adopting a Roma-underclass framework[8]. Ringold is speaking about a “vicious cycle of poverty and exclusion” (Ringold, 2000: vii) which marks the current situation of the Roma, and highlights their increased vulnerability to the hardships of post-socialist transition.
In Romania, the country with the largest Roma population, the National Strategy for Improving the Situation of the Roma was adopted through the Governmental Decision HG 430/24.04.2001, and it had seven main objectives, among which only the last one made explicit reference to the economic hardships of the Roma, aiming at “ensuring the conditions for the equality of chances of people of Roma ethnicity for attaining a decent standard of living” (Romanian Government, 2002). A comprehensive monitoring of its implementation was carried out by the Centre for Resources for Roma Communities Cluj-Napoca and the Open Society Institute Budapest (2004), which presents the difficulties emerging from poor governmental financing and the failure to secure social housing for the Roma, one of the most important steps in fighting their deprivation.
Negative stereotypes and discrimination faced by the Roma are neither the sole cause, nor the direct consequence of their poverty. Minority right experts consider that the EU adopted so far rather frail regulations for the protection of positive citizenship and community rights. The European Commission shows concern for the risks of poverty and social exclusion of ethnic minorities; however, it is difficult to understand what social inclusion means in the case of Roma. Securing the freedom of choice by facilitating access to resources, in line with Sen’s “capabilities” approach, might constitute a controversial policy in the case of a population often prejudiced as idle and welfare dependent.
State Social Transfers for the Roma in Romania
Despite the path-dependency of controlled markets, subsidized jobs, welfare entitlements based on working or family status, and state subsidies for basic goods and services, Eastern European welfare states adopted liberal principles of means-testing and “workfare”, especially at the pressures of the World Bank and the International Monetary Found (Deacon, 2000; Braithwaite et. al., 2000; Zamfir, 1998, Ferge and Juhász, 2004; Popescu, 2004). Social protection reform in post-socialist Romania regarded as priorities the situation of children in institutional care, the unemployed, the restructuring of health services and, to a certain extent, of state-pensions. Means tested welfare benefits had almost no impact on the configuration of poverty (see Teşliuc et.al., 2001). The law on minimum income guarantee was implemented only in 2002, but due to its financing principle (Pop, 2003) and complicated administration of means-testing (Berevoescu and Stănculescu, 2004) its effectiveness is under question and its uptake rate among the severely poor and marginalised is estimated to be very low.
The present study tries to address the question: to what extent do state social transfers reach out the Roma? It uses previous reports on the situation of the Roma in Romania, as well as the results of an independent analysis of empirical data gathered in 2000 within the framework of the project Poverty, Ethnicity, and Gender in Transitional Societies carried out by the Center for Comparative Research of the Sociology Department, Yale University, and conducted by Iván Szelényi. The survey over-sampled Roma populations from the investigated countries, therefore statistically significant comparisons can be traced between Roma and non-Roma households. Later studies of living-standards in Romania, such as the Romanian Household Budget Survey or the 2002 poverty-assessment survey of the World Bank do not use Roma oversamples, the latter not even offering data on the ethnicity of the household-head.
The study of the ethnic dimensions of poverty ought to regard the delicate question of ethnic identification. Distinctions have to be driven between self-identifications as Roma, declarations to belong or not to this ethnic group in a public or formal situation (e.g. survey interview), and being perceived as Roma (Gypsies?) by others, in particular persons from the same living environment, state officials or questionnaire-operators. Existing studies use most often a mix of these criteria, arguing that many Roma refrain from declaring their ethnicity because they fear discrimination[9]. For example, the criteria for ethnic categorization in the case of the 2003 UNDP research consisted of self-identification and “culturally based objective criteria” (UNDP – Regional Bureau for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, 2003:82). However, the authors warn that:
Even a perfectly designed sample will probably over-represent the worst-off segments of the Roma population, since these are recognisably Roma and more unlikely to be integrated in majority communities (UNDP - Regional Bureau for Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, 2003:83).