THE EVOLUTION OF TOURISM IN THE NORTH – WEST DEVELOPMENT REGION (DURING 2009 – 2011)

Fourth year PhD candidate at the University of Oradea, under the guidance of Professor Mrs. Alina Bădulescu in the doctoral research project entitled: "Doctoral studies and Ph.D. candidates for competitive research on a knowledge based society", a co-financed project by the European Social Fund through the Operational Program for Human Resources Development 2007 - 2013, Priority Axis 1. "Education and training in support for growth and development of a knowledge based society" I chose to present this subject in order to demonstrate the connection that exists between tourism and development regions of Romania. Having as research topic "Tourism and development in the Euro regional context” I felt it would be appropriate to devote a subchapter in presenting the evolution of tourism in developing regions of Romania. The research methodology that was used consisted in documentation from the specialised literature and statistical data collection from the site http://www. insse.ro/cms/rw/pages/index.ro.do in order to gather representative data on the evolution of national tourism for the 2009 – 2011, in each districts of North-West. The first part of the paper presents the foreign visitors who come to Romania, hence the largest number of foreign visitors and how it evolved from 2009 to 2011 the number of foreign tourists in Romania.The second part deals with the existing tourism potential in the North-West region and the opportunities offered by the region. The three part deals with the main touristic indicators in the six counties of North-West and the differences between them. The analysis is based on the comparison of main tourism indicators showing the tourist activity in the development regions of Romania, namely: the number of arrivals, number of nights and existing tourist capacity. The last part presents the steps that should be followed to overcome the losses caused by the crisis of 2008-2009 and to ensure a positive growth of the indicators analyzed.