Austerity and the Narrowing of Prospects: Education and Employment in Romania

This article examines the effects of the 2024–2025 fiscal consolidation programme on children and youth in Romania and on the labour market prospects of young people from vulnerable categories. Using Eurostat data and National Institute of Statistics (INS Tempo) time-series on job vacancy rates across public sectors (2015–Q4 2025), alongside existing qualitative research, the article traces how budget reductions in education, social protection, and public employment translate into changed conditions for those who depend most on public services. The analysis shows that austerity discourages educational participation through rising hidden costs of schooling and declining perceptions of return on education, while vacancy rates in public administration, health, and education have contracted by 68–74% from their post-2015 peaks, restricting entry into the sectors that offered the most stable employment. Precarity constitutes the norm of professional entry for young people without qualifications or social capital, and emigration functions as an individual response to institutional failure. Drawing on the capabilities approach, the theory of social reproduction, the concept of precarity, and the family stress model, the article argues that fiscal consolidation without mechanisms for protecting expenditure on younger generations produces cumulative damage that exceeds, in the medium and long term, the savings it generates.