A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Adina Catana and Lavinia Delcea
lasted until mid-2009. Since then, commerce has again increased, and after a year returned to the
values recorded for 2007. With regard to the European Union, trade volume has increased generally,
but its magnitude differs substantially from one region to another. Trade, as the common form of
entrepreneurship, has an important contribution to local economic development.
This paper focuses on the study of trade’s evolution in the NW development region of Romania, and
aims to determine the influence of entrepreneurship, namely the expansion of large stores, on the
employment of the labor force in the region and thereby, its effect on local economic development.
2. The importance of the commercial sector for economic development of the
North-West Region of Romania
Trade is an important activity in its role of public supply and contributing to local quality of life, creating
and maintaining links between people in the community, preventing the exodus of population and
encouraging new diversifying activities (White Paper on Commerce, 1999).
With EU enlargement a gap occurs between organizational forms and the trade in existing EU
member and candidate countries. European policy makers are considering a number of issues which
must be solved to an acceptable level to maintain cohesion within the enlarged EU trade, including:
the need for modernization and logistics management systems, improving the financial situation of
commercial companies (improving financial structures), not accepting forms of business cooperation
in the same field, poor development of intermediate structures involving representatives of retailers
and which could be a lever for promoting collective modernization tools, insufficient recognition of
trade role by local authorities, poor use of funds to help modernize the sector (White Paper on
Commerce, 1999).
2.1 Description of the region
Therefore, traders who operate globally face different markets, with appropriate structures for the
developing stage of the country. A local market, namely North-West Region, Romania, is an emerging
market, corresponding to an average stage of development, characterized by the expansion of major
retailers. It is a market where market share is equally divided between traditional forms of trade and
department stores (Competition Council, 2012). Increasing competition in the sector represented by
hypermarkets determines market leaders to develop large format stores in order to achieve further
growth. However, there are still growth opportunities for large stores, which continue to gain market
share.
North-West Region (Northern Transylvania) is one of the 8 development regions of Romania and
includes six counties: Bihor, Bistrita-Nasaud, Cluj, Maramures, Satu Mare, Salaj. The surface area is
34,159 square kilometers representing 14.32% of the country, with a total population of 2,744,914
inhabitants (North-West Regional Development Agency).
The economy of the Region is booming, with a dynamic growth in recent years in sectors like
construction, textiles, machinery and equipment. Almost all industries are represented here as well as
a growing number of major foreign companies, some of them located in industrial parks in the region -
Tetarom Cluj, Bors, Jibou, Satu-Mare (North-West Regional Development Agency).
Real engines of regional economic growth, SMEs were around 90,000 in 2008, about 14,18 % from
all SMEs from Romania, in second place after the Bucureşti-Ilfov region where the percentage of
SMEs was 23,20% (Romanian National Council of SMEs, 2011). Business support infrastructure is
developing in the region especially as public and private industrial parks: Cluj-Napoca, Jibou, Satu-
Mare, Borş.
The indicator most frequently used to measure the wealth of a region is regional gross domestic
product (GDP), usually expressed in purchasing power standard (PPS) per inhabitant to make the
data comparable between regions of differing size and purchasing power. GDP is the total value of
goods and services produced in a region by the people employed in that region, minus the necessary
inputs. Sometimes alternative or complementary measures of development are also used, such as
per-capita consumption, poverty rates, unemployment rates, labor force participation rates or access
to public services (Nijkamp and Abreu, 2009).
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