REGIONAL IDENTITY: A PREREQUISITE FOR ANY EFFICIENT CHANGE OF THE REGIONAL ECONOMIC STRUCTURE

Most of the territorial frameworks one could define as regions developed into coherent structures only when the multilayered functionality of those peculiar areas changed radically. While the lifespan of the very process of change depends on a plethora of factors such as social and political ones, the factorial core of the change always depends on identity, institutions and traditions born out of the historical evolution of a certain region. Our research goal within this paper would be to point to the fact that a certain regional economic structure is inevitably mirroring a specific economic culture, here defined as the sum of all human creations targeting economic purposes, focusing on the present day Romanian outlook of the issue of regionalization. Identifying and elaborating on those factors that basically illustrate the comprehensive and intricate concept of regional identity and eventually make a contribution to the better administrative shaping of the territory under scrutiny was attemted in chapters 2 and 3. In our own view, expressed in chapters 4 and 5 of this paper, such kind of investigations could contribute to the optimization of the EU regional policy design, to a better governance of the domain, as “Europe for Citizens” should become much more than a slogan in the years to come.