REGIONAL ECONOMIC GROWTH IN ROMANIA - A DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS APPROACH

Over the last decades there has been an increasing interest in measuring and comparing the efficiency of organizational units. The main concern is that it is necessary to take into account multiple inputs and outputs and in order to be able to do it, a method that measures the relative efficiency of each unit is required. In this paper we analyse the economic development of the regions in Romania by using traditional methods as well as a modern approach, Data Envelopment Analysis. In order to do this, we use a DEA model to measure and classify the economic growth and development from several perspectives: labour force, foreign direct investments and Gross Domestic Product. We aim to classify the regions in Romania based on their efficiency scores and comparing the results of the DEA approach with a traditional classification method. The research results show consistent differences in the efficiency scores between regions.