No locality left behind? Structural and institutional drivers of eighth-grade achievement and early human capital development in Romania

This study explores the structural and institutional determinants of early human capital formation in Romania, from a territorial perspective.The paper focuses on educational performance measured at the lowest administrative and territorial unit in Romania.Data from the National Evaluation (final exam of lower secondary education) from 2022-2024 is used to analyse how local socioeconomic context, school organisation, and spatial configuration interact to shape student performance.We combine gender-disaggregated educational data with indicators of human development as well as income, education stock and further demographic characteristics.In this sense, the present analysis provides one of the first nationwide studies to investigate how local communities are converging or diverging in terms of educational outcomes.The results highlight that educational performance is highly path-dependent, as localities with historically higher education stock and human development in the past have an advantage in comparison with rural and less developed communities.As the latter tend to fall behind, the findings confirm that territorial inequalities are indeed reinforced through institutional differentiationschools with legal personality (administrative autonomy) achieve better results than satellite structures, even when the socioeconomic context is similar.The moderation effect of institutional autonomy on the relationship between local development and exam performance outlines that human development alone is not sufficient to deliver convergence in the absence of strong capacity and flexible governance.Results outline that educational inequality in post-socialist Romania is more than a simple function of economic disparity, as it also works for institutional and spatial configurations.The study contributes to further European and international debate on regional convergence, decentralisation and human capital development, as it emphasises that equity in education cannot be achieved in the absence of policy and measures that address governance and autonomy of schools.