OBJECTIVES AND TRENDS OF A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT ECONOMY IN EUROPEAN UNION AND IN ROMANIA

A key objective of the National Strategy for Sustainable Development of Romania is the eco-efficient management of resource consumption to maximize outputs, by promoting a model of production and consumption allowing for longterm sustainable economic growth and convergence to the average performance of EU states in resource productivity. In this paper, we aim to emphasize and analyze the importance of the new concepts and policies called for implementing the SDS in the EU and in Romania and also for transition to a green economy. We shall explain more in detail the significance and relationships between the main features of sustainable development, focusing on the concept of resource efficiency, with its lead indicator resource productivity, offering a way to measure progress towards a ‘green economy’. The time-series data computations and analysis show that the evolution of the Romanian economy in recent years has been inconsistent with the principles of sustainable development model and the gap towards the EU-27 average level of resource efficiency (productivity) has widened, in recent years. As such, the continuation of this trend in the Romanian economy may threaten the sustainability of economic growth in the long term, due to excessive and irrational resource consumption, with negative consequences for the state of natural capital, but also for the desired resource-efficient economic and social development. Some suggestions, conclusions and policy recommendations are made in the end, in order to eventually restructure and reshape the Romanian industry so as to improve the performance of resource-efficiency and productivity, to advance towards a greener economy and an information society.