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TWO THEORETICAL PATHS AND AN ADMINISTRATIVE FAILURE: ORGANIZING ROMANIAN STATISTICAL SERVICES IN 1920S
Abstract
The present paper-work aims to find some explanations for the decline of official statistics in Romania after the World War I, despite a promising tradition. My contribution consists of two main perspectives: a comparative approach (highlighting potential sources of influence, looking at other contemporary European patterns of organizing statistical services) and a close-up view of institutional development of this field in Romania, in the first half of interwar period (using archive documents and other primary sources from the epoch). The overview of the evolution of Romanian statistics in 1920s was one of a failure. The main symptoms were administrative incoherence, internal instability, structural problems, and lack of concrete results. There were two possible paths for building a modern national statistical service at that time: a decentralized model (with different agencies and bureaus under different departments of the Executive) and a centralized model (a single institution with a clear pyramidal structure). The first model was mostly appropriate for advanced countries (like United States of America, Great Britain, France, Germany or Belgium). The latter was rather compatible with newly-established or relatively backward countries (like Poland, Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria). The Romanian political elites tried to combine those two opposite theoretical solutions in a composite construction. It was an uninspired choice. Consequently, at the end of the 1920`s, Romania and Albania were the only European countries without a general census initiated after the World War I.
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