Causes of unemployment in Romania - the need of correlating educational system with economy

The employment but also the efficient use of the available work resources is directly connected to the work market. It is an element that can not be separated from the other elements of the work market, especially from unemployment, because if one deals with them separately, one can not cover all the aspects, particularities and effects on the work factor.

Analysing the employment and unemployment, it can be noticed the fact that employment has three main channels:

-The demographic channel: it refers to the young people who have reached the

proper age for work, without having a professional training, as well as to the

people that are looking for a job for the first time, as it is the case of housewives;

-The “educational system” channel: it refers to the graduates of various education

institutes, having professional training;

-The channel of releasing the labour force working in the economic field as a

result of the changes occurring in the stage of transition to the market

economy( the limitation of activity, factory closures, retechnologization,

reconverting);

There are many causes that generate unemployment, which are to be found at the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. In most of the cases, in an analysis that aims at finding the causes that have generated the unemployment, many characteristics of unemployment are taken into account and they are analysed as “types” of unemployment:

-THE CYCLIC OR CONJUNCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT: caused by unfavorable situations, but which may appear at longer or shorter time intervals.

-THE STRUCTURAL UNEMPLOYMENT: Caused by the modify form of the economy structure on activities, branches and subranches under the effect of the necessity evolution, energy crises, technical and scientifically revolution.

-THE TECHNICAL UNEMPLOYMENT: as a segment of replacing old technologies with new ones and this reducing the members of the work places through reorganization of the company’s activity.

-THE FICTION UNEMPLOYMENT: There are many people who are between work places registered and unemployed. Their members can be reduced by improving the information circuit (considering both the vacancies and unemployed places) and through information.

-THE SEASONAL UNEMPLOYMENT: Agriculture, building and tourism are very vulnerable to the seasonal variances.

-THE RESIDUAL UNEMPLOYMENT: This is represented by those people who cannot be unemployed, maybe because of their incapacity of integrating themselves into the blue modern world.

However, we can say that that there are also a few causes of unemployment which can be found in Romania’s economy. These causes are:

-The natural selection;

-Psychology;

-The changes in the economic structure and the employees’ difficulties to adapt

themselves to these changes;

-The people’s will and behaviour;

-The technical progress;

-The budgetary expenses for “social protection” or “transfer payments” (unemployment

benefit, poverty benefit, etc.);

-The laziness and the individual’s failures;

-The political system.

Like many other countries in transition, the percentage of unemployed who are unskilled labor workers in Romania was higher than the percentage of unemployed who are skilled workers.

Changes in the modern workplaces, brought about by technology, management innovations and increased competition in the global marketplace, have led to many concerns about the adequacy of workforce skills.

Therefore in the contemporary society investing in people and skills is essential. One important ingredient of investments in people is considered to be investment in education.

Education consists in that fundamental social process of transmission of life experience to adult

generations and of culture to children and youth generations, in order to prepare them for life, for their

integration into society. Education is accomplished within the family, but also within an institutional

environment (school, church, army, professional associations, sports, etc.). The educational process follows the formation of the human personality and is accomplished at different levels and areas according to the followed objectives.

The contemporary specialists almost from all areas are preoccupied to find some adequate answers regarding the growing role of the education. Most of them reached the conclusion that there are two motifs which make social sciences to have an interest in education:

(a) this is transmitted to the people, through its culture, no matter the practices, customs and manner of thinking;

(b) the transmission is made through some institutions, some of them playing a bigger social role.

The need for education is real for all categories of people, because, “in the fight for adapting and changing it is necessary first to modify our way of perceiving and of understanding the things from the life we live in. In essence, it is about modelling together, by investing in ourselves, the character and also the entire personality, so that we may accomplish a balanced auto-renewal in the transition process …”

Under the impact of the explosion of informational technology and the new economy, education suffers significant changes, as it becomes continuous and interactive, and on the other hand supposes the capacity to use efficiently, rapidly and creatively the knowledge, and the available information, easy to access, especially by means of the Internet. On the other hand it appears the tendency to accentuate the specialization on different domains.

The pass from general education to the specialized one does not mean the abandoning of the former.

Thomas Friedman, in his paper “Lexus and the olive”, argued: “the dominant tendency in the universities and thinking factories is oriented towards a specialization more and more narrowed: entering in depth in one single field is more appreciated than the overview over more. But, without having the consciousness of the whole – without feeling that different means for accomplishing our goals or for frustrating us converge – we cannot talk of a strategy. And without a strategy, you can expect nothing else than a drift movement.”

Educational and training have become crucial in the process dedicated to build a Europe of knowledge and a knowledge based society. Many studies have confirmed the importance of investment in education as a determinant of economic growth.

If we look at a sorted list of nations with the highest level of secondary schooling, we would notice these to be the richest countries in the world, based on GDP per capita. High rates of education are essential for countries to achieve high levels of economic growth. In theory poor countries should grow faster than rich countries because they can adopt cutting edge technologies already tried and tested by rich countries. But economists argue that if the gap in education between a rich and a poor nation is too large, as is the case between the poorest and the richest nations in the world, the transfer of these technologies that drive economic growth becomes difficult, thus the economies of the world's poorest nations stagnate.