Knowledge Economies in the European Union: Romania's Position

AbstractKnowledge economies represent a high-debated subject among today's research concerns, due to the context of achieving sustainability and putting an end to the economic crisis. The answer to how far away from being a knowledge economy each country is, can be found by looking closely at the Europe 2020 Strategy. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to deepen a former Principal Components Analysis performed on the indicators of this European strategy for each country submitted to research, by making a cluster analysis on the principal components previously discovered. The analysis was ran on the 27 European Union countries plus Switzerland, Norway and Iceland and the level they registered for each of the 8 indicators of the Europe 2020's in 2010. The paper presents the basic quantitative results from the cluster analysis, which allows us to point exactly the position of Romania in the wide European context. The research provides quantitative results and can be seen as a useful instrument for those interested in seeing where Romania stands and where it is heading, based on relevant information and on an accurate analysis