Liberalism and Economic Development in Interwar Romania

Romania’s economic development in the interwar era has always generated fierce debates when it comes to economic ideology. There was an undisputed need to come up with a national strategy of development in order to insure and consolidate the country’s economic independence. The economists of those times clashed their ideas and covered the full range of doctrinarian approaches from rejecting the state intervention to adopting economic dirigisme as a state policy. The reality of the insufficient development of the national productive forces was the starting point, and there were numerous attempts to draw up a strategy to modernize Romania. The issues related to the genesis of the Romanian economy captures the interest of many a great economists liberals, such as Ştefan Zeletin and Mihail Manoilescu, social-democrats (Marxist) such as Lothar Rădăceanu and Şerban Voinea, or agrarians such as Virgil Madgearu and Ion Răducanu.