MICROREGION - A REGIONAL TAXON INTERPOSED BETWEEN COMMUNE AND COUNTY

Unlike other countries belonging to the European Community, where the territorial grid was arranged in the matrix provided by the territorial units for statistics (NUTS) on five distinct hierarchical levels: macro-regions, regions, departments (districts), intercommunity associations (microregions) and communes, in Romania, we currently operate only with taxa 1, 3 and 5; regions and microregions are non-existent from the legal point of view. If regions are now put into question at various levels, microregions are still left at the will of ad-hoc initiatives. Hence, numerous confusions and distortions occur in the absence of their clearly defined status. The present paper reviews a series of situations in which the subject has been debated and the scientific framework in which it should be addressed.