Comparative Analysis of Romania’s Regional Competitiveness

Abstract

AbstractThe implications of the regional competitiveness on the regional development and economic cohesion policy can be highlighted through the regional competitiveness index which is a composite index that measures the regional competitiveness. The goal of the present paper is to create a national ranking of Romania’s regions and to identify the positions of these regions within the European rankings according to the regional competitiveness. Also, competitiveness can be regarded as a way to increase substantially a nation’s standard of living and to keep under control the unemployment rate as low as possible.Other aspects that we tackled in this paper concerned the analysis of the implications of the regional competitiveness on the regional development and economic cohesion policy and in this respect we used temporal comparisons regarding the evolution of both Romania’s regional competitiveness index and the index of the economic development regions of the country. We also made comparisons between Romania and the European Union with respect to the regional competitiveness using the available variants of the regional competitiveness index covering the years 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019. These comparisons aimed, on the one hand, to create a national ranking of Romania’s regions according to their regional competitiveness and, on the other hand, to determine the position occupied by Romania’s regions within the European ranking according to the regional competitiveness index as well as follow in time the latter’s evolution.By making these comparative rankings, we pointed out that there are differences between the position of regions, both at national and European level, based on the abovementioned indexes.KeywordsRegional developmentRegional competitivenessRegional development indexEU averageGDP/capita