A regional perspective on the spatial concentration in Romania’s international trade in 2011

Abstract

In this study, I aimed at analyzing the territorial structure of the international trade in Romania in 2011 on the level of each development region. Starting from the values of the export and import trade flows pertaining to each region of Romania and using statistical methods of analysis, we processed the existing data in order to determine the distribution of foreign trade and to emphasize the regional poles of competitiveness from this point of view. Since other indexes, such as the trade balance or the import/export coverage ratio, are also marks of competitiveness and of the increase or decrease in the performance of a certain economy, we also calculated these indexes for each region of the country. In order to statistically substantiate the existence of a certain degree of spatial concentration of the Romanian international trade in different regions of the country, we resorted to the boxplot graphical representation and to the Gini square and the Gini index respectively.