Social Dependency and Informal Institutions in Romania: Value Change Analysis (English version)

In this paper the authors started from the widely accepted idea that the cultural inheritance of modern society becomes the key to its own development. Within the context of economic and institutional change, after institutional reforms continuing for twenty years, Romania still has the lowest economic performances compared to other countries in Eastern Europe. The informal features, the ideological and cultural factors influence the success of institutional transformation during social changes. In order to identify certain negative informal institutions suspected of being peculiar to the Romanians which act as obstacles in the development of Romania, a survey was conducted. In this paper we focus only on the opinion on social dependency, verifying the existence of a relationship between this behaviour as a characteristic feature of the traditional cultural model and a set of demographic and economic variables. The main results of this study show that in Romania, the probability that a person with no higher education should agree with dependency on social protection is, on average, four times higher than in the case of persons with higher education. The probability that a person with no higher education should agree with this opinion is 82.75%.