The effects of child welfare reform on levels of child abandonment and deinstitutionalization in Romania, 1987-2000
Abstract
High rates of child institutionalization are a legacy of Romania’s socialist regime. After
the fall of the dictator in December 1989, Romania was found to have one of the highest
rates of child institutionalization among postsocialist countries in the region. During the
postsocialist decade (1990-2000), widespread poverty and ineffective child welfare
policies have caused high levels of child institutionalization to remain persistently high.
Romania is one of the ten postsocialist countries in Eastern Central Europe that has
submitted its application for membership in the European Union. Among the necessary
political and socioeconomic reforms that Romania has taken in its transition to a
democratic society, a major criterion for EU accession is to improve the problem of child
institutionalization. Since 1990 the Romanian government has implemented several
major child welfare reform measures aimed at improving this problem. However, in
addition to being hampered by economic constraints, empirical data on the dynamics of
child institutionalization have not been readily available for policymakers to formulate
effective child welfare policies. The objective of this study is to collect and analyze
empirical data for the purpose of examining the effects of Romania’s child welfare
reform legislation on levels of child abandonment and deinstitutionalization. While the
results may provide new information for stakeholders, another important objective is to
provide a model for compiling and analyzing data from local institutions in order to
inform national policy.
The study draws on event history data collected on 21,089 children ages 0 to 3 years who
lived in state-run orphan institutions between 1987 and 2000. These data comprise about
one third of all institutionalized infants over this period and they represent trends in ten of
forty counties outside of Bucharest. These data are the first to make known at a national
level the direction and magnitude of child institutionalization and deinstitutionalization
throughout the transition period. Moreover, this individual level data is sensitive to the
effects of national legislation. Demographic approaches are used to estimate the effects
of legislation on levels of child abandonment and on levels of deinstitutionalization.
A major finding is that while transition period reforms have had a significant impact
overall on deinstitutionalization, there has been a relatively small impact on reducing
levels of child abandonment.
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