HOW TO GET TO A POOR VILLAGE: THE SOCIOLOGICAL WAY1

Dumitru Sandu
University of Bucharest

The paper is devoted to a comparative analysis of two scales for measuring poverty at
village level. The discussion is focused on the grid for poverty measurement in the
practice of Romanian Social Development Fund to target poverty alleviation. The
analysis points out the fact that, in the last three years the grid functioned effectively to
identify poor villages and implicitly to implement of poverty alleviation at community
level. The kind of poverty targeted by the grid is particularly associated with distance
items (village location versus commune center, versus nearest town, modernized roads,
county chef-lieu etc.). The study assesses the grid from the point of view of measuring
village poverty in different geographical areas. Comparing grid measurement of village
poverty with another measure based on estimations of different types of capital (human,
social, material, vital, cultural) results that the RSDF tool is has a rather poor ability to
cope with difference in poverty associated with mountain-plain differences. The final
part of the paper makes clear the relations among household poverty, rural community
poverty and physical environment. The causal profile for different types of
consumptions at the household level are showed to be significantly different and with
consequences for development policies.

If the village is a typical one for what the data in this material describe, then the shortest
answer to the question in the title is: “it’s hard to get there”. It is hard because the village is, most
probably, far away from a real town, lost between footpaths and undeveloped roads, with no links to
the world by bus, train or phone, placed most likely not only at a roads end, but also near the county
border. Even if you manage to overcome the obstacle of roads (or lack thereof), the problems do not
end here. Once you get to the village you start to ask yourself whether you’ve taken the wrong turn.
You get from signs of a road to signs of inhabitation.

1
A study developed as part of the research program of C8/CNCSIS/University of Bucharest „The role of social human
capital in regional development in Romania” COMREG (coordinator D. Sandu).

Sociologie Românească / Romanian Sociology

Annual English Electronic Edition
Issue 3 (2001), pp. 89-106

Original (Romanian) version:

Dumitru Sandu
Cum „ajungi” într-un sat sărac – drumul sociologic
Sociologie Românească, 2001, 1-4, 153-171.

English translation by DELCOM Group & Sociologie Românească,

with the financial support of the Open Society Institute - the Open Access Journals Program.

Sociologie Românească is published by the Romanian Association of Sociology. The issues from the new series
(starting 1999) are available on the journal website: www.sociologieromaneasca.ro, as well as the English
translations from the Annual English Electronic Edition.
90 Dumitru Sandu

What exactly is it that certifies true poverty: is it the discussions on the porch or by the
village hall, or at the pub? Is it how the house looks from the road or what the wife puts on the
table? Does the house itself show poverty if its walls are made of adobe or trellis? It probably does,
but people usually build with what’s available, in the hills or in the mountains. Or, if you find out
from the village hall or the church that there hasn’t been a child death in the village for quite a long
time, what does this mean? It is of course a good sign in a human sense, but socially it says nothing,
if there hasn’t been a birth in a long time either. After seeing the bad roads and the houses fallen
into oblivion, but hearing contradicting opinions from the people, from “it’s bad, it’s very bad” to
“it’s hard, but we manage, what is the conclusion? It is clear that individual and community poverty
is a reality that is defined not only by resources, but also by social signs and symbols. Figures by
themselves are often deceiving. They only speak if put in the context and ultimately reduced to
human behaviors, thoughts and feelings.

Goals

The purpose of this study is to go beyond the metaphor and get closer to describing the
sociologic way to get to, to identify, a poor village.

The approach is prevailingly quantitative, based on the data files at village level. Placing
these in relation will attempt to compensate for the lack of qualitative information. Of course, this is
necessary and I hope that a possible debate on this subject brings them to the light to a greater
extent.

Community poverty is a social state characterized by a great probability of low consumption

at the level of the population that constitutes the community. This can be public or private
consumption, of public or private goods. Questions on “what is a poor village”, how to measure the
level of community poverty in such cases, are asked increasingly frequently in the context of
proliferation of social policies fighting poverty not only at a person or household level, but also at a
community level. More and more projects, government or not, target poor villages. In this context,
the answer of sociologists to the above questions starts to have not only a methodological/scientific
importance, but also a practical one, as an effective justification of social policies.

A significant part of the Romanian sociological research is already involved in the analysis
of the subjects related to family or community welfare/poverty. An important role in the
proliferation of Romanian literature on the matter was played by the World Bank projects carried
out in cooperation with local partners. From the institutions aimed at fighting poverty at the

Sociologie Românească / Romanian Sociology - Annual English Electronic Edition - Issue 3 (2001)
How to "get" in a poor village - the sociological way 91

community level, a strong figure is the Romanian Social Development Fund RSDF2 (based on Law
129/1998). The fund gives out, with priority, grants to the poor rural communities for the small
rural infrastructure, social services and income-generating activities. Law 129 and the operational
manual of the Fund3 specify the details related to the mechanisms through which poor villages can
obtain the grants. This essentially implies compliance with the principles for the mobilization of
local social capital to propose projects that compete at the level of the Fund.
In this article I will cover above all the table used by RSDF to identify poor villages as an
example of a tool with the maximum structuring degree and huge social impact. Comparing it with
other community poverty measuring tools can only be useful to understanding the specific
limitations and virtues of the various tools used in the social programs applied in Romania and in
the academic research on local development. I will show the impact of how village poverty is
evaluated on the orientation the processes for the facilitation of grant or RSDF development project
expansion.
The last part of the analysis focuses, using multiple regression or structural equation models,
the complex relationships between community poverty and household-level poverty.

The RSDF Criteria for the Identification of Poor Villages

Initially, for the first rounds of project selection, the Fund worked with a criteria grid that
considered, in a conventional manner (but also as a function of its financial resources), that a village
is poor if it meets at least four of the 10 criteria4, and then switched to a more flexible grid, with 3
of 8 criteria (see box 1). The current grid, using only eight criteria, was obtained by dropping four
items of community poverty (infantile mortality, percentage of senior citizens, number of TV sets
and number of personal cars), adding two new ones (concerning the private economy sector and
public transportation, and making certain indicators from the old grid more specific. As there are no
values for the village-level poverty indicators in the official statistics, the data required to apply the

2
To classify RSDF as a „social development fund” or „social investment fund” type institution, developed based on a
philosophy of the World Bank, see, for instance, Anthony Bigio, Social Funds and Reaching the Poor. Experiences
and Future Directions, EDI learning resources series, The World Bank, Washington DC, 1998
3
See http://frds.ong.ro/.
4
The initial justification of the poor village identification methodology using a criterion set was made by a complex
team, coordinated by Ana-Maria Sandi (program coordinator from the World Bank) (Despina Pascal, Maria Şandor,
Cristina Vladu, Mariana Moarcăş and, as sociologists, Alfred Bulai and myself). Practically, the village poverty grid
was reached after multiple analyses, with the available statistical data, in order to measure poverty/development as
county and commune level (we obtained a commune development index, COMDEV, that worked rather well with other
indicators), see D. Sandu, Community poverty and disadvantaged groups .Study upon poverty targeting mechanisms of
Romania Social Development Fund, WB, Bucharest, January 1998 and D.Sandu ,Community poverty in Romania rural
areas Foundation for poverty alleviation by Romania Social Development Fund, WB, Bucharest, February, 1998 .

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92 Dumitru Sandu

set are filled in by locals, by members of the initiative group proposing the project at the RSDF.
Consequently, in the 2nd version of the grid, the sociologists who created it proposed to eliminate
the criteria that were frequently associated with reporting errors from the communities and with
interpretation ambiguities.
Box 1. The RSDF Grid for the identification of poor villages
Version I
A village is poor if it meets at least four of the following 10 criteria:
1. “There is no normal access to a secure water source (there is no water in the village, and
for more than 50% of the inhabitants’ access to drinking water is difficult).
2. More than 60% of the households have no electricity.
3. More than 50% of the school-age children take more than an hour to reach the school
with the usual transportation means.
4. In order to reach a doctor with the usual transportation means most inhabitants need
more than two hours.
5. The village is more than 30 Km away from the town and is not connected to it by
railroad or by bus.
6. Infantile mortality rate in the village has been above 50 ‰ during the period 1995-1998.
7. More than 30% of the population is older than 60.
8. The number of TV sets for one hundred inhabitants is less than 4.
9. There is no telephone in the village.
10. Less than 2% of the households own a car.”

Version II5
A village is poor if it meets at least three of the following 8 criteria:
1. „Less than 50% of the households have access to drinking water in the garden or at the
gate.
2. More than 60% of the households are not connected to the electricity network.
3. More than 50% of the children of grades 1 to 4 and/or 5 to 8 take more than one hour to
get to school with the usual transportation.
4. In order to get to a doctor, most inhabitants need more than two hours.
5. The distance to the nearest town of more than 50,000 inhabitants is greater than 25 Km.
6. There is no public transportation (private or state-run) passing through the village at
least once a day or having a station less than 2Km away from the village.
7. Less than 5% of the household have a functional phone.
8. The only businesses in the village are in the area of commerce or food.”
Source: RSDF Operating Manuals, various versions.

Of the eight criteria in the current grid, five are explicitly correlated with distance as a factor
of accessibility to various community services. Of particular importance is the distance to the

5
In developing version II, a significant contribution was made by Manuela Stănculescu, Ionica Berevoescu, Claudiu
Tufiş, „Critique and Development of village targeting methodology” , in D. Sandu (coord) The villages of Romania:
development, poverty and social capital. Updating targeting for RSDF,WB, Bucharest, March 2000.

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How to "get" in a poor village - the sociological way 93

nearest town of at least 50 thousand inhabitants (criteria 4, 5, and 6). It appears that poverty
estimated using the RSDF grid is mainly associated with accessibility of public goods and services
(electricity, health, education, transport and communication, commercial services). Although only
the distance to the nearest town is recorded, it is very likely that behind the value of these indicators
lie two more types of distances: from most of the households in the village to the place where the
reference institution or service operates and the distance between the village to the commune
center.
Thus, for the authors of the grid, village poverty appears mostly as a phenomenon of poor
local institutional development and relative isolation (within the village, the commune and the
region, with respect to the town). At a local level, in the communities that have submitted
applications to the RSDF, the criteria used by the Fund are generally well received6. Nevertheless,
quite a few counties known as poor, especially those in the Romanian Plains, have a relatively low
presence in applications for RSDF grants. Where does this situation come from, and why this
discrepancy between counties in the number of villages that apply for grants? These differences are
caused by a number of factors: number of villages in the county, number of poor villages,
community self-organization capacity, spontaneous diffusion effects with information on RSDF
opportunities, involvement degree of local and county institutions in the process, intervention of
facilitators from the Fund or other institutions, etc7. Beyond these, a significant influence seems to
come from how the identification grid for poor villages was designed. The location particulars of
villages that applied to the Fund allow us to correctly assess the actual effectiveness of this social
diagnosis tool8.

Defining poor villages in the grid evaluation

Available data for a comparison between villages considered poor by applying the RSDF
9
grid and the rest of the Romanian villages clearly and convincingly indicates that the RSDF grid

6
Bogdan Voicu, Adrian Dan, Mălina Voicu, Monica Şerban (January 2002) Assessing the causes of county disparities
in RSDF projects proposals. A Report to the Romanian Social Development Fund, RIQL, Bucharest.
7
For an excellent analysis of these factors, see Bogdan Voicu, Adrian Dan, Mălina Voicu, Monica Şerban, same paper,
2002.
8
The basic file on which we will perform our analysis contains 1281 villages that have submitted 1604 grant
applications with the RSDF. Access to such data was facilitated by courtesy of Mrs. Liliana Vasilescu, Director and Mr.
Alexandru Trică, Head of Information Department of the Fund. The processing method, the integration of that file in
the COMREG database that we developed for the villages, as part of the above-mentioned project of the University of
Bucharest, was done by me, and I am also responsible for how the data was interpreted. The assessments contained in
the paper are strictly personal and do not involve the Fund or my capacity as a former member (1998 to 2002) of the
Board of Directors of this institution.
9
The analysis considers only villages in the rural environment, of communes, not those that belong to cities.

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“works”, leads to identifying villages that are actually less developed or poorer that the other
villages in the country (Table 1).
Most of the applications that arrive at the Fund come from villages having population under
the national average, located farther away from the towns. The infrastructure of villages identified
as poor using the RSDF grid is poorer than in the other communities – fewer households with
running water, more houses built of adobe or trellis. The isolation of poor villages is caused not
only by the distance to the towns, but also by the fact that they tend to be farther away from
European roads and the county center.

Table 1. Profile of poor villages, recognized as such by the RSDF

Villages with no Villages with RSDF grant
Indicators of the village’s Total
applications for applications, meeting the
development/poverty level * villages
RSDF grants poverty criteria grid **
Average population of village, estimated,
804.8 712.8 796.4
1998
Average % in the village of persons over
26.3 27.1 26.4
60, 1992
Average distance to the nearest town with
21.0 24.6 21.3
over 30 thousand inhabitants
Average population of the nearest town
138286.8 125479.0 137114.2
with over 30 thousand inhabitants
Average percentage in the village of
households with running water from 8.1 5.1 7.8
public or private system, 1992
Average percentage of earth/adobe houses
38.2 46.8 39.0
in the village
Percentage of villages in communes near
18.9 10.2 18.1
a European road
Percentage of villages at county edge 45.1 51.9 45.7
Percentage of peripheral villages in the
78.4 84.5 78.9
commune
Percentage of arable land in the total
agricultural land of the village (average 55.0 52.9 54.8
by village)
Children born alive for 1000 women
between 15 and 49, 1992 (average by 1779.7 1911.1 1791.9
village)
LEVEL98: Village development index 5.0 -48.2 0.0
*COMREG Database ** associated with the research project on which this study is based; MIS, RSDF Database; ***
LEVEL98 village development index built by factorial aggregation (*100), as a continuous variable, of 17 indicators
concerning the community human capital, the quality of dwellings, the demographic potential of the village, the
isolation of the village, the demographic modernity degree of the village and the development level of the commune10.

10
For details regarding the LEVEL98 index, see Dumitru Sandu, Development and Poverty in Romanian Villages,
Romanian Sociology, 4/1999. This article is, to a significant extent, a follow-up to the one written in 1999.

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How to "get" in a poor village - the sociological way 95

In the data of table 1 we find the above-mentioned idea of community poverty as a

combination of several distances – to the commune center, to the nearest town, to large cities, to
modern, European roads, and to the county center.
Of all the distances we mentioned, the most important ones are those from the village to the
town and from the village to the commune center (Table 2). If the village is far away from a big city
and is not a commune center, then the probability of substantial community poverty is significantly
higher than for villages that are close to towns or villages that are commune centers.
Despite the fact that the poverty level in the county where the village is located was
considered an important criterion in guiding the facilitation, there is no significant connection
between the number of criteria met by a village with a RSDF grant and the development degree of
the county. Why?
There are, as we have previously mentioned, several factors that may be providing an
explanation are, as we have already mention. First, the grid does not measure the poverty of all
villages in Romania, only that of villages that have applied for RSDF grants. These have entered a
process of social contagion, transmitting information by multiple means, by vicinity and history.
Either because the poverty-measuring grid has certain deficiencies, or because the
facilitation brought by the Fund and other agents has been poorly associated with county poverty, or
because of the strong social contagion mechanisms, the number of poor villages identified using the
RSDF grid does not seem to be significantly associated with the development level of the county.

Table 2. Prediction on the number of poverty criteria depending on village location

Predictors Beta coefficients Significance level
Distance from the village to the nearest town with more than
0.17 0.00
30 thousand inhabitants
Peripheral village in the commune (1 yes, 0 no) 0.08 0.00
Village located at county edge (1 yes, 0 no) -0.01 0.70
Village located near a European road (1 yes, 0 no) 0.01 0.73
Population of nearest town -0.03 0.35
% of arable land out of the total agricultural land in the village -0.16 0.00
Development index for the county (DEVJUD98) -0.05 0.12
R2 0.06
Dependent variable: number of poverty criteria met by the village applying for a GRID grant. If the project was
evaluated for the land, the number of criteria given in the evaluation is taken, otherwise the ones specified in the
application will be considered. When additional variables, such as village population, are introduced, the central or
peripheral character of the village no longer has a significant influence on the prediction equation. We ran the same
model on two sub-samples – one consisting of villages selecting using the GRID version I and villages for which
version II of the GRID was applied. The multiple determination is 5% in the first case and 10% in the second.
Furthermore, in the second model, for the 8-criteria grid, the regression coefficient corresponding to the predictor for
agricultural land percentage no longer appears as being significantly different of 0. As we will also see in other
analyses presented below, the statistical fact is indicative of the better measuring performance of GRID II over GRID I.

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Community Poverty and Geography

As shown in the previous analyses, the village poverty measuring grid operates consistently.
Villages identified as poor, meeting several poverty criteria, are present in regional contexts
favoring poverty – away from a town, peripheral village, relatively low population, poor
infrastructure, etc. What is surprising is the relation between the GRID and the geography of the
area where the community is located. Villages in the plains (with a high percentage of arable land in
the total agricultural land) tend to meet less poverty criteria, regardless of the historic region. Is
community poverty indeed less present in the plains, compared to mountain or hill areas? Or is this
image produced by the limitation of the GRID in measuring community poverty related to the
relief? It is very likely that the type of statistic relation that occurs indicates a serious deficiency of
the GRID and not a social reality.
Supporting this point of view is related to the introduction of another measure of community
poverty, developed using a much richer database (the LEVEL98 index described under Table 1). If
many more information on the village is considered and such information is no longer aggregated in
a rudimentary fashion by counting criteria, but rather using more elaborate procedures, the above-
mentioned paradox disappears. The index, synthesizing the information related to various forms of
community capital – material, human, vital and symbolic – shows a different relation between
poverty and the form of relief that gives the geographic context of the village: rural settlements in
the plaints appear as poorer than the ones in the hills or the mountains (Table 3). The only
exception is across the mountains, where this relation does not seem to be statistically significant.
The data in the previous table fully support the fact that both the village development index
based on aggregating various community capital assets and the simple GRID-type counting
measure the same aspect of the community poverty or development level (the correlation between
LEVEL98 and GRID is significant, as expected from the theory, for all regions).
In other words, the GRID used by RSDF to identify poor villages operates efficiently; it
represents a valid measurement of community poverty, but it clearly has shortcomings with respect
to geographic differences.
It artificially shows lower poverty in the plains than in hill/mountain areas.
The main reason for which the GRID distorts measurement results with respect to the relief
form is not related to the fact that distances between settlements are different in different relief
forms.
What seems to have a decisive influence on the grid’s measuring capacity is that the
variation of building materials and electrification degree is very high from plains to mountain.

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Table 3. Matrix of correlations between village location in the plains and village
development/poverty indicators, by large region
Percentage of
Village arable land in
Village
development the total
Region poverty
level agricultural
index, GRID
LEVEL98* land of the
village
Village development index
1.000 -.146 -.176
LEVEL98
Village poverty index, GRID
Moldavia -.146 1.000 -.141
version
Percentage of arable land in the
-.176 -.141 1.000
total agricultural land of the village
Village development index
Muntenia, 1.000 -.114 -.377
LEVEL98
Dobrudja and
Village poverty index, GRID
Oltenia -.114 1.000 -.194
version
Percentage of arable land in the
-.377 -.194 1.000
total agricultural land of the village
Village development index
1.000 -.254 (.054)
Transylvania LEVEL98
Banat Village poverty index, GRID
-.254 1.000 -.174
Crişana- version
Maramureş Percentage of arable land in the
(.054) -.174 1.000
total agricultural land of the village
The number of villages with RSDF applications included for analysis was 418 for Moldavia, 299 for the southern
regions and 523 for the regions across the mountains. We marked with () the coefficients that were not significantly
different than 0 for p=0.05.
*See the note for table 1.
** The GRID as an index measuring village poverty as a function of the number of criteria in the RSDF grid (see Box
1) met for that community. We normalized with the score z the number of criteria met when the grid had 10 items. We
separately normalized the distribution for the case when grant allocation was done starting from the 8-criterion grid.
The poverty index labeled with GRID represents a concatenation of the two normalizations. If several Fund grant
applications were submitted from the same village, we considered the number of criteria met by the project evaluated
in the field, not only in the office.

In the plains area, dwellings are made, in a much higher proportion than in the mountains, of
adobe and trellis, materials that cause, to a great extent, worse hygiene conditions.
Wider electrification in the plains than in the mountains favors a higher degree of poverty in
the mountain areas. Practically, the GRID neglects the quality of the dwelling as a sign of
community development/poverty.
If we check11, using specific statistic methods, the percentage of electrified households and
the percentage of earth houses, the aberrant correlation between the GRID and the percentage of

11
Partial correlation coefficient, using as control variables the percentage of houses made of adobe and trellis and the

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arable land disappears, becoming insignificant. In other words, for settlements with the same
electrification degree and the same percentage of earth houses, there are no longer fewer villages
meeting the RSDF poverty criteria.

Poverty as a lack of community capital

The discussion so far shows that the Romanian literature in this area and community
intervention practices use two measures. One is the GRID, based chiefly on recording distances and
access to major public services – school, clinic or hospital and to communication and transport. The
other one is the synthetic index LEVEL98, and tries to integrate in a unique measure, using an
algorithm that has been certified in this field, the information related to the main forms of
community capital - human, material, demographic and symbolic.
There is also a third type of measurement, stressing what happens at the household level,
which operates especially with aggregation of poverty rates calculated based on the consumption
expenses within the household12. This is an approach with a great cognitive potential, but strongly
limited by the fact that on the one hand it misses the consumption components for public goods,
essential in defining community poverty and on the other hand by the fact that it is very costly.
Its application involves data at the level of household samples that are representative for the
reference community13.
For the present discussion I think it is useful to detail our references to the relation between
the two available measures – number of poverty criteria met by the villages that have applied for a
RSDF grant and community capital index. That index has six components concerning the human
capital, house quality, the demographic potential of the village, the degree of traditionalism shown
by the population’s behaviors, the isolation degree of the village and the development level of the
commune in which the village is located.
Of the six component of the community capital index, three are significantly correlated with
the poverty index given by the GRID (Table 4).
We ran the same model including the percentage of arable land in the total agricultural land

percentage of electrified households.

12
See, for instance, Cornelia Mihaela Teşliuc, Lucian Pop, Emil Teşliuc, Poverty and the Social Protection System,
Iaşi: POLIROM, 2001.
13
I have tried to promote such an approach starting from the consumption per household at commune level, but
integrating the information with that related to migration and fertility. The community poverty index obtained this way
and calculated for the 242 communes proved to be strongly correlated with the population employment indicators and
community education stock ones (see table 3.4 in Constantin Chirca and Emil Daniel Teşliuc (coord) M.Campeanu,
D.Gheorghe, R.Hallus, F. Panduru, M.A.Pop, D. Sandu, From Rural Poverty to Rural Development, WB, NCS, 1999,

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How to "get" in a poor village - the sociological way 99

of the village on two different sub-samples – one with villages selected starting from 10 criteria and
the one with villages where the 8-criterion grid was applied. In the first case, the new predictor
appeared as significant for the GRID variation, villages with a large number of criteria met
appearing prevailingly in the hill and mountain areas, a situation that has little credibility. In the
sub-sample with villages selected using the 8-criterion grid, village location in the mountains or the
plains no longer significantly influences the values of the GRID. This shows that the second grid
version is better with respect to ensuring comparability of the eligibility decisions for the villages
than the first version. Obviously, “better” does not mean “good”.
The number of poverty criteria met by a village is higher the more isolated is the village, the
lower its human capital and its demographic potential. The absence of a significant correlation
between the GRID and the development level of the commune is not problematic, given that
development variations within the same commune can be very high, and the GRID includes only
information on the reference village and not on the commune to which it belongs.
What is surprising, however, is the absence of a significant link between the index deriving
from the GRID and the quality of houses in the village. This was measured by aggregating the
figures regarding the percentage of houses that were electrified, had running water and (with
inverse scaling) were made of adobe and trellis in 1992, when the last census was performed. This
reflects how the GRID is designed, without including criteria regarding the quality of the
inhabitable buildings.

Table 4. Prediction of poverty evaluated using the criterion grid

Predictors14 B Beta Significance level
Consistency -0.11 0.00
Village isolation degree ISOLATION 0.11 0.11 0.00
Community human capital UMANVIL -0.10 -0.09 0.02
Demographic potential -0.18 -0.16 0.00
Demographic traditionalism 0.02 0.02 0.52
House quality 0.06 0.06 0.07
Community development level UPDATING -0.02 -0.02 0.62
R2 0.06
Multiple regression model having as dependent variable –GRID (number of poverty criteria met by 1240 villages with
RSDF grant application).

Community and family poverty - correlated but irreducible

The limitations of RSDF actions in fighting rural poverty are given not only by the limited

p.55.
14
For a detailed definition of predictors, see Dumitru Sandu, same paper, 1999.

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funds available for grants (minor compared to the extent of the phenomenon) but also by the fact
that community poverty targeted by its actions is different from family, household or personal
poverty. The actions that aim for a reduction in community poverty can only have a limited,
relatively low effect on household poverty. Arguments in favor of this assertion derive from a
detailed analysis of the relation between community poverty/development and welfare/poverty at
household level.
Available data (Table 5) clearly support the conclusion that the community poverty level is
a significant factor in household-level poverty but, at the same time, it shows that the dependency is
weak: the consumption of food and non-food products at the level of a rural household (see Table 5
for how this is calculated) is determined firstly by the income source and secondly by the education
stock of the household. The general level of food and non-food consumption is higher in
households that live mainly on salaries and have a relatively high education stock.
Community factors of household-level poverty act on family consumption both through
factors related to household socio-demographic structure and through other factors, not specified in
the model.
Village development seems to have a greater impact on food consumption than on the non-
food one. Community poverty at the level of public goods significantly influences poverty related
to food consumption in the households, especially the one that depends on financial resources.
This observation is consistent with previous conclusions based on partial measurements of
the community development level. In a model path where the dependent variable is the household-
level consumption (latent variable expressed by “Income” and “modern extended-use goods”) a
direct, positive influence on that variable was noticed from the accessibility degree of the commune
15
in relation with the nearest town . In other words, poorer communes appear as being characterized
by an increased degree of isolation in the regional urban context.
Similarly, it was found that consumption expenditure is lower in households from
communes located far from urban centers, with a high level of infantile mortality16. The new
analysis, introduced by figure 1 of this paper, makes this relationship more apparent, as it is a first
measurement of the correlation between the village-level development index and an estimation of
the household consumption.
Villages in the plains are also found in the model of figure 1, consistent with the findings

15
Dumitru Sandu Community and regional poverty in regional Romania, Romanian Journal of Sociology, vol. X/1999,
p.129.
16
Constantin Chircă and Emil Teşliuc (coord.) Mariana Câmpeanu, Doina Gheorghe, Radu Halus, Filofteia Panduru,
Marius Pop, Dumitru Sandu, (1999) From Rural Poverty to Rural Development, World Bank, National Commmission

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How to "get" in a poor village - the sociological way 101

shown in Table 3, with the same feature of a community development level that is much lower than
in mountain areas.

Figure 1. Local development and goods consumption at rural household level

COMMUNITY HOUSEHOLD as analysis level

as analysis level
-0.16
Percentage of Expenses with non-
-0.10 0.35
arable land food goods 0.16
-0.27

Goods consumption in
0.06 Salaries are
Education the main
Average age

household
- stock in the income source Expenses with
of adults
0.27 household 0.21 of household 0.33 0.86 food 0.74
in household
0.26 (1 yes, 0 no)
-0.18 0.23 0.21
0.11
Village
Value of self-grown
development
0.23 0.33 food production
level - LEVEL98
0.11
0.03
0.15

The path model presented above is adequate for the data: the covariation matrix associated with the model is not
significantly different than the empirical covariation matrix (p=0.06 for a value of chi square equal to 19.13 and 11
degrees of freedom). Other synthetic values indicating the same high degree of adequacy of the model: RMSEA=
0.029, p for test of close fit=0.944, AGFI=0.982. Standardized partial regression coefficients are mentioned on the
orientated graph arcs. These also appear inside the blocks marking dependent variables. All path coefficients are
significantly different than 0 for p=0.05. To simplify, I haven’t shown in the model the error terms and the covariations
among them. In the theoretical model I have allowed covariations between the error terms for “education stock –
consumption for non-food products” and “expenditure for non-food products – consumption of self-grown food”.
Estimation using the method of maximum verisimilitude on 866 cases (no missing values) of the total 976 that exist in
the rural subsample of the FSD Public Opinion Barometer, the May 2002 survey.

Furthermore, it appears that household-level consumption in the plains is much lower than
in the mountains. This case gives significant empiric evidence for the fact that relief impacts
poverty/development. And its impact is not only at community level, but also at household level.
Both villages and households that are located in the plains tend to be poorer than the ones in the
mountains. This is a long-term situation. The clearest evidence of this fact during the inter-war
17
period is brought by Anton Golopentia . The relationship between relief and rural household
welfare is a complex one and deserves further detail and specification.
Not all welfare indicators have lower values for households in the plains, compared with
those in the mountains. Only the consumption of purchased food is lowered in the first case,
compared to the second. For the rest, mountains, hills and plains do not seem to differ significantly
with respect to consumption of grown agricultural products and non-food goods (Figure 1).
This finding leads to an interpretation hypothesis that two types of influence of relief on

of Statistics, p.49; Dumitru Sandu, (1999b), Spaţiul social al tranziţiei, Iaşi: POLIROM, 191.
17
Anton Golopenţia, (1936) Modernization degree of Romania’s rural regions, Romanian Sociology and in Anton

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102 Dumitru Sandu

rural household-level poverty. The first one is the one associated with the socio-demographic
structure of villages depending on the relief form.

Box 2. How consumption is measured at rural household level

The BOP-FSD survey of May 2002 contains questions related to measuring food and non-food consumption in the
household:
„CHEL. Approximately how much money was spent, totally, last month, in your household?”
„CONSAL. And for food products you bought in your household last month (food, beverages, including
restaurants, coffee, cigarettes, juice), approximately how much did you pay?”
„AUTOCONS. Last month, products obtained in your household or received (from relatives, friends, etc.) covered
how much of the household consumption? (1 not applicable, 2 about one quarter, 3 about half, 4 about three
quarters, 5 all consumption).”
Total food consumption (CALIMENT) of the household is given by the food consumption of purchased products
(CALIMFIN) and that of products grown within the household (CALIMNAT):
CALIMENT=CALIMFIN+CALIMNAT (1)
I obtained a food consumption rate based on own production by recoding (SPSS syntax):
RECODE AUTOCONS (1=0) (2=0.25) (3=0.5) (4=0.75) (5=1) INTO RAUTOCON.
Equation (1) gave:
1= (CALIMFIN/CALIMENT) + RAUTOCON (2)
From (2) I determined the calculation formula and the syntax for CALIMNAT and non-food consumption
(CNEALIM):
COMPUTE CALIMENT=CONSAL/(1-RAUTOCON).
IF (RAUTOCON=1) CALIMENT=CONSAL.
COMPUTE CALIMNAT=CALIMENT-CONSAL. (3)
COMPUTE CALIMFIN=CONSAL.
COMPUTE CNEALIM=CHEL-CALIMFIN.
It appeared that approximately 35% of the total food consumption in the rural areas is covered from own
production. The percentage seems to be seriously underestimated if we compared with the one obtained from official
figures: data from the “Household integrated survey” indicates, for the period July 1998 to June 1999 a percentage of
self consumption for the rural areas around 66%18. The differences originate from multiple sources, related to the
estimation period: whole year for HIS and April for the BOP survey, a month with low self-consumption percentage;
higher estimation errors for BOP than for HIS. The underestimation affects the evaluation of the self-consumption
level. All multivariable calculations made using the data of the May 2002 survey remain valid. Level estimates are
weaker, but relationship estimates seem to be good.

Population structures that favor development – high percentage of human capital, young
people, population employed in non-agricultural sectors, private sector, etc. are more present in hill
and mountain villages than in the plains. Why this is so is another problem that needs to be
19
approached from a historical and sociological perspective . Beyond the socio-demographic
structure differences, villages in the mountains and the plains also differ in other aspects associated
with the local cultural patterns, the intensity of communication flows and revenue opportunities. All
these factors should be considered to explain the differentiation of food consumption remaining

Golopenţia (2000) Complete Works, vol. II. Statistics, demographics and geopolitics, Editura Enciclopedică, pg.285.
18
National Statistics Board, (2000) Aspects regarding life quality during the period July 1998 – June 1999, pg.53, table
15.
19
Golopenţia (2000).

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How to "get" in a poor village - the sociological way 103

after socio-demographic makeup variables were checked. There are arguments20 supporting the
hypothesis that of the three categories of factors mentioned above, what matters most is the
difference in revenue opportunities (higher in mountains/hills than in the plains).
A surprising thing is that self-consumption is not higher in the plans than in the hills or
mountains. One explanation could be that, despite of larger agricultural areas in the plains,
agricultural production is not significantly higher for family households plus that most of self-
consumption consists of animal products and not vegetal ones.
Self-consumption is higher in households having more animals and more adults employed in
salary-based sectors. In other words, self-consumption volume is higher for wealthy households in
relatively developed villages. It does not matter whether the village is located in the mountains or
the plains nor does it matter what agricultural area it owns or uses. An also insignificant statistical
influence is that of socio-demographic structure of the household with respect to education and age.
The image obtained above is largely inconsistent with the public image. The latter seems to
suggest that self-consumption is higher in poor households of poor villages. Another aspect of self-
consumption is closer to that image – that concerning not the volume but the percentage of self-
consumption in the total food consumption.
Even here the resemblance to the common sense image is only partial: self-consumption
percentage in the total food consumption tends to be higher in households with many animals in
poor villages of the plains. Thus, what does matter is village poverty and not household poverty.
The influence of education is strongly differentiated depending on the type of consumption:
it does not appear in the causal profile of foodstuffs from self-production, has an average level for
purchased food and is maximized for non-food purchased goods (Table 5).
To the extent that the main source of income in the household is salary, from the state or
private sector, consumption of all kinds – food from market sources, food from self-consumption or
non-food – tends to be higher. This observation weighs in favor of the idea that rural poverty is not
reduced, in the short term, by agriculture, but rather by promoting opportunities of salary incomes,
in the village or in the city.

20
Introducing the variable „level of income per person in the household” into the multiple regression model does not
cancel, but reduces the value of the regression coefficient of the relief formo on the consumption of purchased food.
Otherwise, the relationship „relief form – food consumption by purchasing” is extremely resilient and remains
statistically significant even if very different predictors are introduced, concerning income sources, cultural
consumption, historic region, etc.

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104 Dumitru Sandu

Table 5. Welfare predictors at rural household level

Dependent variable in the multiple regression model
Consumption Consumption of Consumption of Household
of purchased self-production non-food modern goods
Predictors food food products *
B p B p B p B p
Constant 255.73 0.58 -483.55 0.33 -1395.06 0.03 -1.80 0.00
Number of persons aged 18 and
221.77 0.00 107.59 0.02 27.27 0.65 0.08 0.00
18+
Number of children under 16 in
-47.00 0.39 22.30 0.71 12.50 0.87 -0.03 0.42
the household
Education stock in the household 74.88 0.00 46.96 0.06 191.97 0.00 0.13 0.00
Average age of adults in the
1.76 0.73 5.22 0.35 12.69 0.08 0.00 0.33
household
Salaries are the main income
source in the household (1 yes, 0 685.36 0.00 306.52 0.02 789.99 0.00 0.41 0.00
no)
Hectares of agricultural land
13.66 0.48 16.45 0.43 -3.55 0.90 0.02 0.05
owned or used
Total animals in the household
-16.55 0.44 53.91 0.02 199.82 0.00 0.03 0.01
(large cattle equivalent UVM)
Arable percentage of agricultural -8.43 0.00 -1.10 0.57 -3.85 0.13 0.00 0.55
Village development index
164.67 0.00 116.90 0.05 -77.74 0.31 0.19 0.00
LEVEL98
R2 0.25 0.08 0.21 0.33
Data source: BOP-FSD, May 2002, rural subsample of 976 cases. Shaded values indicate non-standardized partial
regression coefficients that are not significantly different than 0 for p=0.05. * Index built as a factorial score of
ownership indicators (1 yes, 0 no) for car, color TV set, freezer, automatic washing machine, mobile phone
(KMO=0.80; unifactorial grouping with factor proper value 48%). I did not include the model keeping the same
predictors in the table, but the dependent variable is the percentage of self-consumption in the total food consumption
of the household. In this case, the only predictors with b values significantly different than 0 for p=0.05 are UVM
(positive relation), village development (negative relation) and percentage of arable land in the total agricultural land at
village level (positive relation). R2=0.15

In conclusion, socio-demographic and income opportunity structures are greatly

differentiated between villages depending on their geographic location. It is not the location itself
that brings such differences in market food consumption, but rather the structures mentioned as
associated to such locations. The problem is not entirely clarified yet. Additional research is
required to better identify the factors that connect relief and consumption structure and level.
The level and percentage of self-consumption in the food consumption have different causal
profiles. The highest levels of self-consumption are encountered in wealthy households of rich
villages, and the highest percentages in the poor plains villages.

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How to "get" in a poor village - the sociological way 105

Conclusions

The poor village identification Grid proposed and used in the RSDF methodology for grant
award is in practice a rather valid and effective measuring tool. Villages selected under the GRID
are really poorer than those that have not received RSDF grants. The number of poverty criteria
recorded under the GRID tends to be higher for small villages, located away from cities, with a
peripheral status in their communes and remote from modern roads or county capitals. The GRID
works very well in identifying community poverty as a subtle social “play” of distance between
settlements, between settlements and modern communication ways. If we add the fact that it is
relatively straightforward to apply and has a direct contribution to the creation of a community
conscience on the local development issues, we have the image of a tool that fulfills its purpose to a
very good extent.
Despite this performance, the GRID proves to be a weak tool in correctly measuring
community poverty under different geographic conditions. It erroneously indicates a better situation
– i.e. less poverty – in rural area in the plains. Reality seems to be completely different: villages in
the plains are poorer because of worse houses, by the reduced education stock and by the low level
of income associated with preponderant agricultural employment.
This shortcoming of the GRID is the direct cause of difficulties encountered by the Fund in
obtaining more project applications from villages in the plains, especially from the ones in the
Romanian Plains. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that villages in the plains tend to be larger
than the ones in the mountains/hills and consequently with less units per area unit. Such geographic
factors contribute directly to the appearance of a smaller number of villages eligible for RSDF
grants from plains areas.
Version II of the RSDF grid seems to be better, in that the results of its application no longer
depend as much as for type I on the relief form associated with the village location.
Once the nature of the GRID’s limitations is identified more precisely, solving its problems
is possible by methodological corrections: adding the criterion “percentage of adobe or trellis
houses in the settlement, over …%” to the poverty criterion set (however, this solution does not
fully solve the shortcomings of the GRID, its incapacity to correctly distinguish poverty in the
mountains from that in the plains) reducing the number of poverty criteria from three to two for
villages located in the plains (with more than x% of arable land in the total agricultural land);
including the precalculated criterion given by values of the LEVEL98 index, based on the level of
community capital and an elaborate aggregation method (the village is part of the 20% of rural
communities with maximum poverty, according to that index) in the set of criteria used by the

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106 Dumitru Sandu

GRID; replacing the simple criterion-counting GRID measurement with a measure based on
community capital LEVEL98; optimizing the orientation of RSDF facilitation by dropping the
“poor county” criterion, which has been ineffective in the Fund’s experience so far, in favor of the
criterion “village with high probability of poverty”. In the above-mentioned COMREG file, a
development/poverty index is calculated for each of the villages in the country. Starting from here,
one can precisely identify the 10% or 20% villages with the highest probability of community
poverty.
For each of the proposed solution there are pros and cons that are easy to identify. The goal
of my paper was to compare the two types of measurements of community poverty and to show
their complementary potentiality and their specific limitations. Detailed discussions on the solution
to be adopted are better held at the RSDF level, in connection with the type of social policy that it
continuously designs and redesigns. It is a question whether the optimum solution could be a
combination (integrating options 1 and 3, for instance).
Among the series of methodological problems whose solving could contribute to an increase
the social effectiveness of the Fund, I would like to mention, in the end, the one regarding the need
to correlate grant size with community size. It is obvious that social issues and logic are very
different in a 20-inhabitant village compared to a 700-inhabitant one.
The analysis of the relation between community poverty and household poverty is relevant
first of all for the limitations of RSDF in fighting poverty. Household level consumption depends
on the development of the village, but to an even greater extent on the socio-demographic and
occupational structure of the household members. Food and non-food consumption is higher in
households with a large stock of human capital and income that comes mainly from salary sectors,
located in developed villages of the hill and mountain areas. Given the low level of dependence of
household consumption on community development, it is to be expected that the impact of RSDF
actions on household-level consumption to be slow and span long periods of time. Of course, the
community consumption of goods or services is sensibly and immediately increased by absorbing
RSDF grants. However, private and public consumption have different dynamics and rules.
The analysis of private consumption at a household level shows significant differences in
the causal profile of this type of consumption. The level of self-consumption based on agricultural
production tends to be higher for wealthier animal-growing households of the developed villages.
Conversely, the percentage of self-consumption in the total food consumption tends to be higher in
households with a large number of animals located in poor villages in the plains.
Food consumption based on purchasing goods is high in households with resources of
human and material capital from developed villages in the hills and mountains.

Sociologie Românească / Romanian Sociology - Annual English Electronic Edition - Issue 3 (2001)