A comparative analysis on the regional policy and coordination of structural instruments before and after Romania's accession to the European Union

Абстракт

After 1990, on the political and economic scene of Romania took place a series of transformations under European mark, transformations that led to the development of an environment with specific rules and principles of competition and free market mechanisms. As a natural evolution process, it appeared and was developed a new concept related to the regional development policies, a concept that was among the essential requirements of European integration. In Romania, the regional development policy has been early shaped, since 1996, and the chapter of the Acquis on this topic was opened in 2002. There are two types of tools used by the European Union to stimulate and accelerate the process of regional reform. First, the EU has substantial financial instruments to help and facilitate the tasks of national actors on the formulation of the policy agenda in accordance with the requirements of EU reform, the decision-making process and also the implementation. The financial support is achieved through the allocation of pre-accession funds. Secondly, the European Union has also other tools at its disposal for determining the Member States: this is namely the monitoring procedure through the annual reports. This study aims to present the most important issues of regional policy in Romania from two perspectives: the pre-accession period _ in which our approach will analyse the legislation and institutional framework for the development and implementation of programming documents, and the post-accession period (after 2007) _ in which we will present the most important progresses that Romania has made on regional policy and coordinating of structural instruments.