Adaptive Economic Systems: Analyzing the Influence of Infrastructure, Unemployment and Tourism on Romanian Salaries

In 1990, the Romanian economy changed in a crucial manner, after the communist regime has fallen, moving from a centralized economy to a capitalist one, introducing also services as a sector apart from industry and agriculture. The 1990s period was a difficult one, due to political instability, which lead to a decrease in Gross Domestic Product. Thanks to the integration of Romania in North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union, the Romanian economy started to grow significantly, obtaining over 65 billion euro which facilitate the development of the country. The infrastructure is the sector that benefits from the European Union funds, starting with 113 kilometers in 1990 and achieving a total of 1275 kilometers at the end of 2024. The scope of the research is to identify the contribution of infrastructure – measured through highway kilometers of each county, together with the railway kilometers of each county, tourism – measured through the type of tourists, tourists number per county, and unemployment rate on the evolution of the net salaries per county in RON, using Python programming language. Moreover, the Romanian economy presents the characteristics of a complex adaptive system, which makes it suitable to be analyzed by various algorithms. Using a clustering approach, the counties in Romania have been divided by considering the three types of indicators mentioned above and policy recommendations have been formulated for the counties included in the lower-measured category.