ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

ECONOMYTHE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INTERNAL MARKET INSOUTH-EAST ROMANIA DURING THE INTERWAR PERIODCEZAR AVRAM, DIANA PĂUNOIU, LAURA SAVAThe perfection of state union has brought important changes in thesocio-economical structure of Oltenia. This area has always had an obvious butfluctuant development of the manufacturing forces. The great opportunities ofdevelopment brought up by the Historical Document from 1918, December, 1 st ,although greatly affected by humane losses and material damages provoked bythe War complemented by the social and political Romanian anachronisms ofthose years, have enclosed the domestic Romanian market as well. This veryimportant field of the national economy was to meet both an importantquantitative growth and qualitative restructurings. The new division of theRomanian economic space reclaimed unification, re-organization and redefinitionof the institutions strongly anchored in trade, of which we can nameThe Chambers of Trade and Industry. In 1922, out of the 20 Chambers of Tradeand Industry Craiova was the third due to its number of inhabitants 1 . Its activitywas based on the National Laws from 1886, 1925, 1929 and 1934.The growth of the active population in the non-agricultural area ofhistorical Oltenia has also contributed to the development of the domesticmarket as well as to the means of monetary and credit deals, with the exceptionof the period 1929-1933, also named “Crisis Years”. Besides the otherestablished forms of trade met in the previous centuries both in urbane and inrural areas, the 1921 Agrarian Reform, together with other laws referring eitherdirectly, or indirectly to trade, have triggered “a proliferation of the weekly andperiodical market places” 2 , an increase of the goods in stock and moreimportantly, an increase of the number of deals.If in 1914, the Historical Oltenia (Dolj, Mehedinţi, Gorj, Romanaţi,Vîlcea) had a surface of 25,028 square kilometers with a population of 1,463,8811 The District of Craiova encompasses the 5 counties of Oltenia: with a surface of 25028square kilometers, a population of 1,383,873 inhabitants, being the third district in Romania afterthose of Chişinău and Cluj, (Apud Paul Emanoil Barbu, Dinică Ciobotea, Ion Zarzără, “TheHistory of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Oltenia”, Craiova, Publishing House of the“Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Oltenia”, 2000, p. 112.2 “The History of the Romanian People”, vol. III, the Encyclopedic Publishing House,Bucureşti, 2003, p. 114.ARHIVELE OLTENIEI, Serie nouă, nr. 21, 2007, p. 317–332