Understanding Left-Behind Places in a Contrastive Approach

What is it about?

How are left-behind places in a country compared to other types of places in an Eastern European country? A typology of local human development is designed and tested for the case of the Romanian society. _x000D_ Methods_x000D_ One starts from the United Nations model of human development, structured by the three dimensions of education, economic development and health. This is adapted to the local level and two contrasting measures are designed – an index and a typology of local human development. The typology resulted from a cluster analysis. It is validated by bi-variate and multivariate analysis (multinomial _x000D_ High emigration rates, irrespective of the destination, do not bring lower development, and, implicitly, left behindness, to the local origin in Romania. A key finding of the analysis is that the destination of migration counts. There is a higher probability, in 2018, of bringing left-behindness in localities with a higher number of emigrants to Italy, in the years preceding 2011. In a contrasting vay, high emigration to Italy favours lower comprehensive or economic development later on, at the local level. _x000D_ Human development is highly differentiated by destination countries of emigration and by historical subregions. It is especially for such contexts that the quantitative approach could be misleading. Public policy targets could be better identified if qualitative and quantitative approaches are simultaneously used.

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