Business environment development and regional policy in North-West Region of Romania

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on the regional policy performance in the field of business environment development in Central and Eastern Europe by presenting specific findings of the on-going evaluation of the regional policy through Regional Operational Programme (ROP) 2007-2013 for the North-West Region of Romania, focusing on "What does not work?" and "Why?", and on possible solutions and emerging challenges. The research activity took place in two directions: theoretical evaluation of regional policy in the field of business environment development-based on analysis of official documents regarding on-going evaluation of the ROP 2007-2013 in Romania, the European Commission opinions, official data and internal data of the Romanian Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration and North-West Regional Development Agency, and quantitative research based on the survey of the most significant aspects concerning the projects implemented in the field of business environment development through ROP 2007-2013, applied to the beneficiaries of the projects finalized at 1.10.2012. (2014)The Authors. Published by Elsevier BAT. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.orgilicenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).