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Romania Ownership of Economic Assets
When the Constitution of 1965 declared Romania a
socialist
republic, the country had already made substantial headway
in
socializing its economic assets. And judging by
Ceausescu's words
on the occasion of his sixty-ninth birthday in 1987, the
campaign
to eliminate private ownership appeared irreversible: "One
cannot
speak of a socialist economy and not assume the socialist
ownership
of the means of production as its basis." The state owned
and
controlled all natural resources except for a steadily
declining
amount of agriculturally marginal land still in private
hands
(see Land, this ch.).
All of industry had been socialized, but
for a
small number of artisan workshops, which contributed less
than 0.5
percent of total marketable output in the 1980s. Even
cooperatives,
categorized as socialist forms of ownership, had fallen
into
decline at the very time they were enjoying a renaissance
in the
Soviet Union and the other members of the Council for
Mutual
Economic Assistance
(Comecon, see Glossary).
Cooperative farms, for
example, were considered ideologically less acceptable
than state
farms, which had priority access to rich land,
fertilizers,
machinery, and other inputs. And cooperative industrial
enterprises
accounted for only 4.3 percent of national output in 1984.
Data as of July 1989
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