4. Substantiation Study on natural resources and Economy

Cluj ranks 2nd in Romania when it comes to public and private industrial parks available for investors. These parks attracted FDIs that amass hundreds of millions of Euro and thousands of jobs, but their area and range of services provided to clients still continues to be insufficient.

The last wave of major foreign investments in manufacturing dates from 2013/2014 (Bosch, De Longhi). Since then, the local economy continued to grow at a fast pace thanks to the expansion of the existing investors and entrepreneurs, while no other world ”giant” decided to settle here.

Cluj is a magnet-city for young professionals and talents, thanks to the large number of universities and students. The slow development of the R&D sector makes the city vulnerable to the brain-drain phenomena. Also, a large share of the jobs currently occupied by blue collars might be subject to automation in the next decade.

The local economic growth is currently driven by the IT sector, but most of the companies are focused rather on outsourcing rather on developing their own innovative solutions.

Despite the availability of technology transfer entities at county level, the innovation demand and offer rarely match.

Cluj County has a varied, complex and complementary natural and anthropic tourist potential, but unequally distributed in the county territory, which led to a differentiated tourist arrangement and capitalization, the mountain and marginal contact area and urban centers being the beneficiaries of superior tourist arrangements, fact reflected both in the superior capacity of attraction and “fixation” on a longer duration of the tourist demand and, implicitly, in the level of the economic efficiency of the tourism activity.