Poverty and the Roma as a lasting entanglement in Central and Eastern Europe

This chapter reveals how the understanding of “Roma poverty” in Central and Eastern Europe is connected to general poverty theories and visions about eradicating poverty among the Roma promoted by international organizations. It reviews studies and documents that researched the poverty of the Roma and cross-examines with broader political economy and its policy implications. The author's argument is built on critical scholarship explaining that the racialized structural poverty of the Roma has accumulated over decades, and it was hardly was mitigated by any developmental initiatives. The major developmental research and policy approach in the region centered around economic growth as the primary tool to improve economic progress and simultaneously reduce poverty. Three decades of research and policy implementation show that despite the economic growth which has been achieved at the national and regional levels, it has not had a sizeable impact on reducing the percentage of people who are living in entrenched, extreme poverty. The approaches focusing on how neoliberal racial capitalism generates and reproduces inequalities, marginalization, and exclusion, thereby perpetually fostering and consolidating racialization, help us to understand the reproduction of extreme poverty in the era of neoliberal capitalism when “Roma inclusion” has been high on the developmental agenda.