How does the middle class look like in Romania?

Besides the scientific enterprise of trying to define the dimension and characteristics of the middle class, we try to imagine an artistic find of middle class, seeing it as a woman in the beginning of maturity, capable to come through her own capabilities and her knowledge acquired through educational process, a person who can change the society around her with her innovative ideas, bringing the progress. The documentation activity about this subject lead us to the conclusion that the image of the middle class depends very much on the way you choose to look at her. You can look at her from the distance, without the possibility to say many things about it, if you choose some general criteria in order to separate middle class from other population groups. Or, you can look very closely at it, having in this way the possibility to see all the details of this image. Everything depends on the choices made in defining the criteria which separate middle class from the other social classes. Measurement of middle class is not an easy task due to several reasons. Firstly, it requires the classification of population into social classes, for which it is necessary to take into consideration some objective criteria, as levels of income, occupation or levels of education, skills or others, but also subjective criteria as the prestige of the profession or company, manual or non-manual character of work, social category of family or residential area where the person was born. The larger the number of criteria taken into account is, the bigger the subjectivity of the classification is. Secondly it is difficult to find availability of data sources allowing the estimation of middle class. Ordinary data sources, namely the sample surveys, use major classification classes, which make the analysis less detailed. This article proposes to present two first perspectives, strictly quantitative, regarding the measurement of middle class in Romania, through the population incomes and respectively through the professional categories. For each of those two perspectives, the article presents the main characteristics of the persons defined as middle class.