President of Association of Economic Universities of South and Eastern Europe and the Black Sea Region ASECU Determinants of Regional Development in the Context

Our purpose in this paper is to seek out the defining factors of regional de-velopment as they correlate to the process of globalization. Our first task is to define – or rather, to describe – the term ‘region’, in rela-tion, of course, to the main objective of our research. The relevant literature as yet offers no definitive solution to the question of the division of space into regions and the problem of regional delineation. In general terms, however, we can agree that a region is a spatial unit characterized by certain interdependent (geo)physical, economic, cultural and social structures. To attain the socio-economic objectives it sets itself, a region must have a specific minimum size, to render feasible the planning and economic execution of the necessary major (and, as a rule, indivisible) infrastructure projects. If the purpose of regional division of a country, in the context of a single, unified geographical space (such as the European Union), is the achievement of properly programmed, even (multi-sectoral) growth, on the basis of relatively autonomous, self-supporting spatial units, to be coordinated primarily on th