A preliminary analysis of the results in the project 'Typologies of underdevelopment and marginalization in rural localities and small towns in Romania'

The project begins from the coordinates provided by the sociological literature which show that local underdevelopment is the result of structural factors as lack of employment and the predominance of employment in (subsistence) agriculture, lack of infrastructure (access to public utilities such as gas, drinking water or paved roads) but also the distance to the nearest city that could be a pole of development or human capital (the education stock of the local population) and it tries to refine the analysis by overlapping the typology looking at local contexts and by deciphering the factors and mechanisms of underdevelopment at local level. The proposed approach has an exploratory character. The article explain this approach in the first part, and in the second part presents a synthesis of the results of the analysis of the data collected in Alba county (as an exploratory case study) for testing the research tools in the first phase of the project.