THE ROMANIAN REGIONS COMPETITIVENESS

Over the latest years, the issue of competitiveness has been the subject a lot of studies. Even if many of them have tended to concentrate on countries or industries, there are remarkable studies concerning the regions competitiveness (for example, 6th Periodic Report of the EU regions). In this paper we are providing an extension to the Romanian regions of the European Commission analysis focused on EU region competitiveness. Certainly, because of the lack of reliable data on the different aspects that determine overall competitiveness, any analysis can only be partial. However, as in the Commission studies, in Romania four factors emerged as being closely linked with regional differences in the competitiveness: the structure of economic activity (the division of employment between agriculture, manufacturing, construction and services), the extent of innovative activity (employees from research activity), regional accessibility (transport infrastructure) and the skills of the work force (training level). 21. DEFINING REGIONAL COMPETITIVENESS The concept of competitiveness is relatively clear when applied to enterprises, but i