Book Chapter Details
Mandatory Fields
Stan, S.
2018 Unknown
Economy, Crime and Wrong in a Neoliberal Era
Neoliberal Citizenship and the Politics of Corruption: Redefining Informal Exchange in Romanian Healthcare
Berghahn
Oxford
In Press
0
Optional Fields
healthcare, neoliberal reforms, citizenship, informal payments
I adopt a historical perspective that links citizenship configurations to the changing nature of informal exchanges since the fall of the Communist regime at the end of the 1980s. The chapter starts by describing the configuration of citizenship and informal relations during the socialist period and then looks at the dismantling of the socialist worker-citizenship and at the new role played by informal exchanges during the 1990s. It then links the rise of neoliberal citizenship during the economic boom (2000–08) with the increasingly divergent nature of informal exchanges, attending particularly to how they help to reproduce or, alternatively, temper inequalities of access to services. The chapter then turns to the austerity period that followed the boom, and shows that the consolidation of neoliberal citizenship and the accelerated privatizing of healthcare have led to informal exchanges taking forms that are intimately imbricated with the public–private mixes to which these reforms have given rise. It also shows that the intensification of union and popular protest against these reforms has triggered increased government attempts to identify informal exchanges as corruption, and to use them to justify further privatization of healthcare.
J. Carrier
978-1-78920-044-7
172
194
Grant Details