Amalia BĂDIŢĂ, Mirela MAZILU & Liliana POPESCU
Geography Department, University of Craiova, Romania, amalia.badita@gmail.com, mirelamazilu2004@yahoo.com, popescu_liliana25@yahoo.com

CHALLENGES FOR HUMAN CAPITAL AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF RURAL AREAS. A CASE STUDY ON CRAIOVA METROPOLITAN AREA, ROMANIA

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Sustainable development is a key issue in full expansion due to the need of new, innovative activities for a proper economic and social development of communities. The new economy implies also investments in human capital in order to bring benefits and to improve the quality of life in different areas, either urban or rural. Investments in human capital influence the environment and society and they have to be made only through coherent policies. Previous studies showed that despite many policies that are undertaken at the European level regarding the development of human capital in rural areas, there are still many issues that have to be dealt with, such as: low investment in education and training; and exclusion or migration of workforce, which led to a stagnation or even deterioration of the human capital. The study aims at investigating the human capital in the rural communes of Craiova metropolitan area (24 communities) focusing on four pillars: demography, workforce, education and health system; secondary, statistical data (2008-2013) were analyzed in order to present the quantitative assessment of the human capital in the study area. The main findings stress that rural communities have undergone lately a decrease of the population and of the economic activities; they have a low accessibility to the medical and educational system; thus, the metropolitan association started to conduct to several projects of social growth and economic revitalization.