Variante de delimitare a regiunilor de dezvoltare economică în România

Abstract

In the former European communist block, the rural area has a significant demographical potential, capable of strongly influencing political and administrative decisions. This is why regional development cannot be achieved in normal conditions without taking into account the sustaining and participating potential of the rural population. In addition, in some nations of the former Eastern European communist block among which Romania we witness an obvious ruralisation process as a result of the industrial collapse in most urban centers. The world historical experience facilitates the choice and the adoption of the adoption of the most suitable ways of development, together with a considerable financial support from the European Union. The European Union has founded ever since 1998 the common Nomenclature for statistic territorial units (NUTS) in order to facilitate the collection, the establishment, and the diffusion of regional statistics in an organised manner. Fundamentally, the defining of territorial units is done per administrative units already existing in member nations. The geographical, economic, and social presentation of the economic development regions of Romania (NUTS 2), regions delimited in accordance with Law 151/1998, shows obvious disparities, the lack of functional economic and commercial links within the regions, and total disregard for traditions and historical backgrounds. In a word, delimiting development regions was only based on secondary considerations of statistical and proximity nature. In this paper we suggest a few variants of delimiting development regions that meet, as much as possible, the NUTS criteria established by the European Union, i.e. NUTS 1 should cover development macro-regions with populations between 3 and 7 million inhabitants; NUTS 2 should cover development regions with populations between 800,000 and 3 million inhabitants; and NUTS 3 should cover regions with populations between 150,000 and 800,000 inhabitants and corresponding to the present counties of Romania.