Title: THE INFLUENCE OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT POLICIES ON REGIONAL COMPETITIVENESS IN ROMANIA
Abstract: Ten years after Romania's accession to the European Union, it is still overshadowed by a series of challenges, which is why the European Commission periodically checks our country's fight against them, especially corruption. Romania has encountered multiple obstacles in accessing the structural funds as financial instruments of the European Union's cohesion policy. Through this paper we aim to identify the role played by Romania, more precisely its regions, in the absorption of funds provided by the European Union, referring to the regional competitiveness and the regional development policies. We also want to highlight the interdependence between regional competitiveness and regional development policies, the latter influencing competitiveness through support for innovation and, implicitly, economic growth. The paper is based on a comprehensive consultation of the specialized literature in the field, which includes not only scientific articles but also specialized books, reports of the European Union institutions, Eurostat databases from where statistics that can be compared later with the data in the official documents for a better understanding of the institutional and organizational framework of the regional development policies. The work is one that combines the theoretical and empirical spheres, going from general to particular, from macro level to micro level, to finally present the conclusions and boundaries of the research. The results show that, once Romania joined the EU, it benefited from the aid received by the European community in the form of non-reimbursable financial aid to support the development of its regions. The regional development policy in Romania seems not to have been understood and implemented rigorously, and this can be seen by the low absorption of European funds. We tend to believe that what actually took place in our country was just alignment with the requirements of the European Union as a requirement of the latter.