Department of Economics and Economic Policies, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania.
Front Public Health. 2024 May 16;12:1105518. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1105518. eCollection 2024.
The COVID-19 pandemic had a strong territorial dimension, with a highly asymmetric impact among Romanian counties, depending on pre-existing vulnerabilities, regions' economic structure, exposure to global value chains, specialization, and overall ability to shift a large share of employees to remote working. The aim of this paper is to assess the role of Romanian local authorities during this unprecedented global medical emergency by capturing the changes of public spending at the local level between 2010 and 2021 and amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and to identify clusters of Romanian counties that shared similar characteristics in this period, using a panel data quantitative model and hierarchical cluster analysis. Our empirical analysis shows that between 2010-2021, the impact of social assistance expenditures was higher than public investment (capital spending and EU funds) on the GDP per capita at county level. Additionally, based on various macroeconomic and structural indicators (health, labour market performance, economic development, entrepreneurship, and both local public revenues and several types of expenditures), we determined seven clusters of counties. The research contributes to the discussion regarding the increase of economic resilience but also to the evidence-based public policies implementation at local level.
新冠疫情具有强烈的地域维度，罗马尼亚各县受到的影响极不对称，这取决于先前存在的脆弱性、地区经济结构、对全球价值链的敞口、专业化程度以及整体将大量员工转移到远程工作的能力。本文旨在通过捕捉 2010 年至 2021 年期间和新冠疫情期间地方一级公共支出的变化，评估罗马尼亚地方当局在这场前所未有的全球医疗紧急情况下的作用，并利用面板数据定量模型和层次聚类分析，确定在此期间具有相似特征的罗马尼亚各县集群。我们的实证分析表明，2010-2021 年期间，社会援助支出对人均 GDP 的影响高于公共投资（资本支出和欧盟资金）。此外，基于各种宏观经济和结构指标（卫生、劳动力市场表现、经济发展、创业精神以及地方公共收入和几种类型的支出），我们确定了七个县集群。该研究有助于讨论经济弹性的提高，也有助于在地方一级实施循证公共政策。
