THE VOLATILE ADMINISTRATIVE MAP OF RUMANIA.

Planners have reformed Rumania's administrative map almost a dozen times since the end of the First World War. The mosaics produced by these overhauls reflect in the size, shape, number, and distribution of their constituent local govemment areas the political objectives that inspired reform. With one exception (1938) the mosaies also exhibit high degrees of areal correlation between their eonstituent divisions and ethnic, historic, eeonomic, and physical regions in the Rumanian landscape; moreover, the planners who designed the exceptional mosaic tried purposely to avoid such congruence. Administrative divisions fashioned in geographical vacuums according to geometrical formulas have not typified contemporary Rumania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]