| Summary: | The study of economic agents’ behaviour, whose nowadays tendency is togroup themselves in space as clusters, has an important place in the field of localizing industrialactivities. This is due to domestic scale economies, known as agglomerations economies.According to Edgar M. Hoover (Hoover, 1948), domestic scale economies are specific tocompanies; the economies of localizing - to a certain branch, whose companies form clusters incertain geographical arias, and the urbanization economies are specific to cities, where thereare clusters of companies from different branches. The specialty literature regarding localeconomic development, based on the idea of cluster starts from well-known economic theories,such as: agglomeration theory (Alfred Marshall), the theory of spatial localizing of industrialunits (Alfred Weber), the theory of interdependence of locations (Harold Hotelling), the diamondtheory (Michael Porter), the theory of entrepreneurship (Joseph Schumpeter), the theory ofgeographical concentration. Basically, the common point which links them are the conceptswhich occur in these theories, such as: industrial district, industrial agglomeration, spatialinterdependence, concepts which lie at the basis of the cluster idea. Clusters represent animportant instrument for promoting industrial development, innovation, competitiveness andeconomic growth. If, at the beginning, the effort to develop clusters belonged to private personsand companies, nowadays, the actors involved in their development are the governments andpublic institutions of national or regional level.The objective established within the Lisbon Strategy (2000), to make the EuropeanUnion “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy”, is tightly linked to thenew approaches of the European economic policy, to competitiveness. One of the policies isfocused on developing at the European Union level clusters in the high competitiveness fields. with an innovative character. Using statistical data relatively recently by the European ClusterObservatory (2007), our paper aims at revealing the fact that clusters are linked to prosperityand that it exists a necessity to consider them as a central part of each economic strategy for theEuropean Union member states. We shall also present the initiatives of cluster type between theEuropean states, successful clusters, with a possible multiplication effect. The paper will alsopresent Romania’s trials to achieve an industrial policy based on competitive economicagglomeration.
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