Regional Convergence in the European Union: A Success Story or an Unaccomplished Goal?

Dumitru Miron and Ana-Maria Holobiuc ()
Additional contact information
Dumitru Miron: The Bucharest University of Economic Studies
Ana-Maria Holobiuc: The Bucharest University of Economic Studies

A chapter in Business Revolution in a Digital Era, 2021, pp 29-42 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract The European integration adventure, treated both as a process and as a state of facts, taking into consideration the deepening or the enlargement, continues to have both advocates and opponents. Although in the early stages of the integration process, the founding countries had similar economic levels, the accession of the Central and Eastern European states has called into question the goal of achieving a sustainable level of cohesion. The main purpose of this paper is to study real convergence in Central and Eastern Europe, by focusing on the NUTS 2 statistical regions. In this respect, we have calculated β- and σ-convergence, illustrating that the poorer regions from the European Union recorded higher GDP growth rates than the developed ones. Moreover, we have examined the industrial specialization in Romania’s regions, trying to identify the existence of appropriate circumstances to create efficient business clusters. In this respect, we have concluded that in seven out of eight NUTS 2 regions, excepting Bucuresti-Ilfov, the main economic activity was manufacturing in 2017. Bucuresti-Ilfov was the only NUTS 2 region from Romania which had a large share of persons employed in other sectors, such as administrative and support service activities and professional, scientific and technical activities. Overall, our study suggests that the Central and Eastern European regions were catching up between 2000 and 2017 and the establishment of industrial clusters had an important contribution in enhancing convergence.

Keywords: European Union; Romania; Regional convergence; Business activity; Industrial clusters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:prbchp:978-3-030-59972-0_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030599720

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-59972-0_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().