ABSTRACT
The Romanian welfare system went through important transformations during the last 20 years, yet its historically embedded subordination to economic achievement persisted. The early 2000s stand as a turning point for labour policies and minimum income schemes, increasingly marked by ‘activation’ and deregulation. Public social insurance was however reinforced within the same period, and health care shifted paradigmatically from a Beveridgean to a Bismarckian model, with quasi-market mechanisms set to contain costs. Family policies remained shaped for a dual-earner family model, with modest but universal child allowance, and meagre redistribution towards low-income families. Social assistance benefits failed to counter poverty, and services for vulnerable categories remained in the responsibility of families or outsourced to private organisations. The 2010 ‘austerity package’, issued in response to the global crisis, largely ignored the use of social transfers as automatic stabilisers. The selective reversals that followed (2014–2015) remained parametric, without altering the neoliberal path. In 2017, an unprecedented fiscal reform weakened the balance between capital and labour in public social insurance. Almost 30 years after the fall of the communist regime, we witness a dualised welfare system, with relatively generous, contribution-based horizontal redistribution for those in stable employment, but little vertical redistribution for precarious workers and those with limited market capacity.
