Territorial Competitiveness at County Level in Romania, by Urban-rural Typology

CHITEA, Mihai (mihai_chitea@yahoo.com) 

Chițea Mihai Alexandru is a scientific researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Economics Bucharest, Romania, with an educational background in agricultural and agro food economics, and a PhD in agronomic sciences. Main research fields are agricultural economics and rural studies. Other fields of research: territorial competitiveness, qualitative research related to agriculture and rural areas. Over the last 10 years he has been involved in several European research projects, targeting agricultural infrastructure and development, ecological agriculture and bio economy. Research Overview The paper presents approaches the evaluation of overall territorial competitiveness, at county level, following the development of an evaluation model based on a series of theoretical elements elaborated throughout the time, at international and national level. The starting point was a previous analysis of the theoretical framework of territorial competitiveness, from which the following idea emerged: as we access the upper aggregation levels (regional, macro regional, national), the local performance fades into an aggregated result. The elaboration of the model turned to classical econometric methods, for standardizing the selected indicators, as well as to factor analysis for highlighting the determinant factors of competitiveness at county level. The analysis of the results took into consideration the urban-rural typology and highlighted significant differences between the three types of counties (predominantly rural, intermediate, predominantly urban), as well as the determinant character of some groups of indicators from the model structure, like economic performance and population and labour force. (Key words: competitiveness, territory, urban-rural typology.)