Thursday, 25 March 2010: 14:30
In the context of Romania’s accession, in 2007, to the EU, achieving real convergence, as soon as possible, with the developed member states, became one of the main goals of the macroeconomic policy of the Romanian government. This goal implies finding the most effective ways for accelerating economic growth and raising competitiveness. Since the population of Romania, hence the labour force, is (almost) constant in the medium term, growth can be achieved only by improving human capital and/ or by technological innovation.
In this paper, we propose and analyze a discrete time macroeconomic growth model which takes into account human capital, as well as technological innovation, as engines of growth. We use labour productivity as proxy for human capital and foreign direct investment (FDI) as proxy for technological innovation.
Using the model, we perform empirical analyzes of the trajectories of the main macroeconomic indicators of the Romanian economy, which are optimal with respect to several objective functions. We also highlight the “catching up” process, by comparing the values reached by these indicators with the corresponding EU standards.