COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF POVERTY IN ROMANIAN REGIONS

Romania, alongside of Bulgaria is among the poorer Member States EU-28. At the end of 2016, according to Eurostat, the share of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion was 38.8% of the country's total population, while the EU-28 average of 23.5%. At the same time, Romania has the fastest economic growth among the EU-28 member countries, which means that this growth is not evenly distributed in Romania: some regions have developed and others have not developed, have accentuated social inequalities within the country. This paper is a statistical review of poverty in Romania, which main scope is to highlight regional gaps. Our results show that both the economic and the social convergence have not been homogeneous at the level of the regions of the country, there are significant gaps between capital city and other regions of Romania.