This document examines the geographicdistribution of employed individuals across Romania, theimplications, and recommendations. Under optimal conditions,cities concentrate economic resources and human talent in avirtuous cycle of increasing urbanization that generates adiverse range of opportunities, enabling people to findbetter-paying jobs, companies to recruit employees with theright set of skills, and capital and ideas to flow acrossspace more efficiently. The benefits of agglomeration kickin rapidly, increasing the attraction of cities as livingand working spaces. However, in the short term, unevendevelopment across regions is both a normal and aninevitable phenomenon. Regrettably, many policymakers tendto resist growing internal divergence, trying toartificially spread the benefits of growth evenly acrossspace. In practice, however, such policies rarely have theintended effects, often wasting resources and slowing downthe economy. The basic solution for lagging areas is insteadto connect people living there to opportunities in growingcities and offer them access to basic infrastructure forencouraging short-term working mobility and discouragingdepopulation/ peremptory migration in favor of intra- andinter-county commuting. In the long run, convergence inliving standards will occur as benefits from leading areasspill over to surrounding communities and people who hadleft lagging areas bring back capital, jobs, and ideas.
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