Organizarea teritorială a spațiului rural în contextul reformei administrative

Abstract

The undertaking of a territorial and administra-tive reform is one of the main topics in both public and scientifc debate these years. The political de-bate is focused on some specifc issues such as: how many regions Romania must have, which cities should be the centers of those regions or what kind of institutions should be created. From this point of view, this paper presents a new perspective about the process of regionalization. The goal of this paper is to analyze the theoretical and empirical bases of the actual system of the rural localities. In Romania there are more than 2800 rural localities, but only a small part of them have the f-nancial strength to sustain the development policiesby their own. The vast majority of the communes are dependent upon the public allocations. On one hand, the most developed rural localities, situated with predilection in peripheral areas of important urban centers have important competitive advan-tages relying on the size of the population and the specifcity of the economic activities. On the other hand, communes from poor areas have a signifcant defcit of public utilities and infrastructure caused by the absence of fnancial resources. Therefore, the coordinates of the local budget of revenues and expenditures represents the main determinant in the process of development of the communes. This paper argues that a serious analysis of the regiona-lization process should take into account the reform of the actual rural administrative system.