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Innovation is the key to sustainable growth, development and competitiveness, and also the engine of the economic clusters. Nowadays innovative processes are conducted within clusters where each component plays its own strategic role at the highest rate of specialisation. The development of the clusters relies on the cooperation between companies, universities and R&D institutions and local, regional or national authorities. First of all, a cluster emerges due to the spatial proximity of businesses, but the real motivation consists in the need for cooperation; the effect, along with the rational use of resources and the activities’ specialisation, relies in the enhancement of competition, a positive outcome for the economic environment. Within a cluster, the partners share resources and develop future strategies; the mostly known positive outcomes are the specialised labour force, products of higher quality, cost reductions, powerful networks of suppliers and clients, etc. In our paper we aim to assess the cluster phenomenon in Romania and we seek to determine the catalysts for the emergence of the cluster partnerships in Romania. Our approach is bidirectional: firstly we assess a correlation between the economic clusters, as a cause, and as effects, the number of working persons, unemployed persons and recorded turnovers of the regional businesses where the clusters exists; secondly, we analyse the presence of clusters in the selected regions as an effect caused by the size of the active labour force, unemployed persons, number of higher education institutions, population of 25-39 years old, working specialists and technicians and lastly, the recorded turnover, in our opinion, all these six factors being the most relevant for the development of clusters. We considered suitable for our statistical approach to calculate the Pearson coefficient and also to apply the ANOVA method being able to assess also the extent of each factor’s influence on the development of the Romanian clusters. In the last part of this paper the findings are tested by using the Student’s and Fisher’s tests.

The paper aims to study, reveal and understand one of the most important production factor, considered by some as being labor, understood nowadays as human capital. It is important to reveal and to demonstrate that the investment into human capital will have results with a very high return on investment, maybe not so seen in the first years to come just after the investment, but for sure as a big result and a cause for economic development. The investment into human capital can be determined by public or private investment. Either the case the result will be in favor of the national economy

Operating with business ethic we meet, some ethical systems, some of them developed in Antiquity, that still have a great influence upon economics development. One of these is the ethics of virtue. The aim of this paper work is to focus upon the one ethical system virtue ethics and to illustrate his influence in economical field, offering a new coordination in this direction. We understand the importance of the human character for a successful leadership and management. Recent ethical dilemmas illustrate us how a vicious character has an influence not only to the possessor of that type of character but also to the entire community where he develop his activities. For a comprehensive understanding I expose a briefly review on virtue ethics as it was developed by Plato and Aristotle, ant its new coordination and influence upon our contemporaneous economy, illustrated by some examples.

In this paper is realized an empirical analysis of the influence of social welfare and taxation on insurance. The analysis is performed on a sample of 36 countries and a horizon of 3 years (2005, 2007 and 2008), being tested 4 linear regression models (life premium subscribed, non-life premiums subscribed, number of companies and number of employees in the insurance sector). The results of study confirm a relationship between the development level of countries and insurance, but exclude the existence of the relationship between taxation and insurance.