Some Empirical Approaches of the Competitiveness’ Diamond – The Case of Romanian Economy

In this paper, we try to overview some of the main extensions of Michael Por-ter’s competitiveness diamond, considering the complexity of actual interna-tional economic interdependencies, starting with the presumption that activi-ties of multinational firms should be considered as an endogenous factor of the diamond. Also, using some adequate data, we try to show the configura-tion of the competitiveness’ diamond in the case of Romanian economy, tak-ing into consideration the actual stage of research in the field. We consider such a venture as being very useful in the context of regional economic inte-gration of our country’s economy, because it could help showing the actual configuration of some of our variables in relation with the international busi-ness environment. Our empirical results show, as expected, that Romania has smaller scores with respect to most of the variable taken into consideration. Nevertheless, analyzing also the international variables and not only the do-mestic ones, as Porter sustains, gives a better insight relative to the national competitiveness, moreover in the case of a small open economy. For such a country like Romania, we consider that the double diamond is better to be used compared to the simple one.