Romania INDUSTRY
Castle and steel mill at Hunedoara
Courtesy Scott Edelman
Geographic Distribution
The development program sought to distribute industrial
capacity evenly across the country. This policy of
disaggregation
often appeared counterproductive to western observers. For
example,
by sitting a vast steel complex at Calarasi, some of the
most
valuable farmland in the country had to be sacrificed. But
the PCR
argued that dissemination of industry into the countryside
was
necessary to transform Romania from a peasant society to a
proletarian society, one of the prerequisites for
attaining
communism.
The campaign to industrialize all regions was
moderately
successful. In 1968 nearly half of the forty judete
reported per capita industrial output of less than 10,000
lei, but
by 1990 no judet was expected to produce less than
50,000
lei per capita. In addition to the Bucharest
agglomeration, which
accounted for nearly one-seventh of total industrial
output in
1986, major industrial centers had been built in many
other regions
of the country. Measured in value of industrial output,
the ten
leading judete in 1986 were Bucharest, Prahova,
Brasov,
Arges, Bacau, Galati, Timis, Hunedoara, Sibiu, and
Cluj--in
that order. These ten judete accounted for 51.2
percent of
industrial production in 1986. The ten most industrially
developed
judete, with 48.2 percent of all fixed industrial
assets in
1986, were Bucharest, Galati, Prahova, Hunedoara, Brasov,
Gorj,
Arges, Bacau, Dīmbovita, and Dolj. On the other hand, the
ten
least developed judete, Satu Mare, Botosani,
Calarasi,
Ialomita, Bistrita-Nasaud, Covasna, Vrancea, Harghita,
Salaj,
and Vaslui, had only 8.9 percent of the fixed industrial
assets..
Data as of July 1989
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