INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS AND REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN ROMANIA

The analysis of industrial clusters became a very actual topic for academic debates and for Governments trying to foster economic growth. In Romania, since the end of the 1990's until the present day there have been many researches foccusing on the identification of industrial clusters and on the analysis of triggering factors which stood at their origins. All these studies concluded the fact that Romanian clusters appeared "naturally" through industrial attractiveness for direct foreign investments and in the absence of a regional policy to stimulate the formation of competitive productive agglomerations. On the other hand the regional development policy since the end of the 1990's has led to the development of public clusters. Beginning with 2005, four cluster initiatives were promoted as instruments to grow competitiveness through collective learning. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]