The geography of regional clusters in Romania and their importance for entrepreneurial activities

Regional clusters and entrepreneurship have become very popular subjects in economics, regional science, and economic geography. In the last decade, a large number of scientific papers 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 attitudes and activities interact and their characteristics are normally bound to the region. Local entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial activities can be the starting-point for the evolution of a regional cluster. There are lots of arguments for the hypothesis that existing regional clusters have positive impacts on entrepreneurial attitudes and entrepreneurial activities. But, exist only few analyses refering to the relationship between clusters attributes of a region and the entrepreneurial activities in the same region. From our knoledge, it is not such of analyses about Romania. This paper aims to identify regions with functional or potential industrial clusters, from Romania, and to analyse their impact on the entrepreneurial environment. Data about all the companies acting in Romania in 2011 is used to elaborate the spatial clusters in the most concentrated Romania industries. A second data set, collected as part of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), serves to assess the relationship between regional clusters and entrepreneurial activities and attitudes. GEM intends to measure the level of entrepreneurial activities and to identify the individual factors and the entrepreneurial framework conditions that may explain differences in the levels between the regions of Romania and the entire country.The paper tests the empirically proven hypothesis which stipulates that the existence of one or several industrial clusters in a region has a positive impact on the number of start-ups and attitudes in the same region. The results obtained from descriptive and regression analyses have shown that there is a positive relationship between the number of clusters and the number of employees in clusters in Romanian regions on the one hand and entrepreneurial activities and entrepreneurial attitudes like the assessment of good start-up opportunities on the other.