The article delineates the shifting forms of minority governance that took shape after 1989 in solving Roma related affairs and its ambiguous effects on the ground. I argue that, after 1989, the new social and public policies adopted a more neoliberal trend in solving Romani affairs through processes of decentralization, public-private partnerships and mobilization of civil society (Roma) organizations as key tools for empowering and social inclusion of Romani communities, abandoning old governmental programs focused on discipline, control and policing. However, as we will see in the Romanian case, these processes and policies had ambiguous effects and often have gone together with a diminishing of democratic accountability and control of Roma related affairs by state/public institutions and with the devolution of responsibilities to non-governmental and human rights organizations, Roma representatives from public institutions and communities themselves (see also van Baar 2011a).

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This paper starts from the observation that development projects

The article delineates the main methodological deficiencies and datasets available for comparing income inequality at the European and world level. The article is divided in two parts. In the first part of the article, I present the main datasets and methodological deficiencies when trying to compare income inequality in the world. Although efforts have been made in the last decades to generate comparative databases, the qualities of some indicators are rather doubtful and also there is no common ground on conceptualizing inequality indicators and measuring them, some of which are income-based, while others are household expenditure-based. Then, I present two classical studies on studying income inequality after the Washington consensus. In the second part of the article I sketch an overview of rising income inequality in Romania after 1989 by presenting some income inequality indicators and comparing them with other former CEE countries. However, I will pinpoint that Romania’s case is rather exceptional in the EU and, when comparing standard income inequality indicators, further explication needs to be delivered. I conclude that while income inequality is the result of macro-structural changes that occurred during the transition to market capitalism, political decisions are not to be played-down.