A regional perspective on the spatial concentration in Romania’s international trade in 2011

Ancuta Stangaciu

doi:10.29358/sceco.v0i16-17.72

Abstract

In this study, I aimed at analyzing the territorial structure of the international trade in Romania in 2011 on the level of each development region. Starting from the values of the export and import trade flows pertaining to each region of Romania and using statistical methods of analysis, we processed the existing data in order to determine the distribution of foreign trade and to emphasize the regional poles of competitiveness from this point of view. Since other indexes, such as the trade balance or the import/export coverage ratio, are also marks of competitiveness and of the increase or decrease in the performance of a certain economy, we also calculated these indexes for each region of the country. In order to statistically substantiate the existence of a certain degree of spatial concentration of the Romanian international trade in different regions of the country, we resorted to the boxplot graphical representation and to the Gini square and the Gini index respectively.

Highlights

FOB export, CIF import, trade balance, the import/export coverage ratio, spatial concentration, boxplot, the Gini index
When Romania joined the European Union, the statistics referring to the international trade in goods were established by adding the data from the Intrastat and the Extrastat statistic systems
The INTRASTAT system was created and developed within the European Union, being operated in Romania by the National Institute of Statistics, in order to collect data directly from the business operators in the member states which exchange goods with other member states of the European Union, while the EXTRASTAT system is operated by the National Customs Authority, since it is the institution that collected and processed the customs declarations, and the level of the imports and exports between Romania and other countries outside the European Union was established based on these declarations.[1]