EU CLUSTERS - A COMPARISON BETWEEN NEW AND OLD MEMBER STATES

Striving to get economies of agglomeration and scale, to better use resources, to improve quality, innovation, skills and productivity and benefit of spill over effects, companies with similar or linked activities tend to cluster, creating new and complex structures which are beneficial for both the member companies and the region where they agglomerate. Clustering “comes naturally” and clusters are nothing but another stage in the evolution towards ever more efficient productive structures. This paper makes a comparative analysis of the economic clusters in the new and old European Union member countries - as they were identified and evaluated by the European Cluster Observatory – with a stress upon the comparison between the clusters in Romania, Germany and Great Britain.