The influence of cluster type economic agglomerations on the entrepreneurship, in Romania

Regional clusters and entrepreneurship have become very popular research topic in many areas, such as: economics, regional science, and economic geography. A large number of scientific papers published in the last years investigate the empirical evidence for clusters, their definition, and their implications for economic policy. Also, a series of working tools for regional cluster analyses have been proposed. Entrepreneurial activities interact and their characteristics are normally bound to the region. Entrepreneurial activities take place in interaction with other economic activities conducted at the local level, and the interaction between them can be the starting point of an economic cluster. There are lots of arguments for the hypothesis that existing regional clusters have positive impact on the entrepreneurial activities. But only few analyses exist referring to the relationship between clusters attributes of a region and the entrepreneurial activities in the same region. From my knowledge, it is not such of analyses about Romania. This paper aims to identify regions with potential industrial clusters, from Romania, and to analyse their impact on the entrepreneurial environment. Data about all the companies acting in Romania, in 2011 are used to elaborate the spatial clusters in the most concentrated Romania industries. A second data set with information about new establishments in last year is used, from the National Trade Register Office statistics. This data set serves to assess the relationship between regional clusters and entrepreneurial activities. The paper tests the empirically proven hypothesis which stipulates that the existence of one or several cluster type agglomerations in a region has a positive impact on the number of start-ups in the same region. The results obtained from descriptive and regression analyses have shown that there is a positive relationship between the number of cluster type agglomerations and the entrepreneurial activities.