The current challenges that the EU faces highlight, as never before, the Union’s crucial need to move forward on its integration and convergence path, as well as the necessity to manage more efficiently any potential dilution risks and threats. Thus, the EU needs to find new approaches and action tools that would be most adequate for the current economic, political and geopolitical context and for the specificities of each member state. In this context, the project proposes a ground-breaking analytical model for the study of resilience with the case study of Romania, although with a wider applicability at European and international level. As such, the project offers a new and state-of-the-art comprehensive model of resilience in a multi-disciplinary, multi-level and multi-actor approach and will consolidate the knowledge in and about the European and particularly Romania’s regional growth and development perspectives. As such, the project aims to design and provide new approaches, methods and instruments for EU policies towards deeper convergence, regional development and growth. The research activities and results will greatly benefit from the participation of lead experts with wide expertise and international visibility, in both the research teams and the management structures  which will enhance considerably the quality, competitivity and visibility of Romanian research activities and results at international level. Thus, the position of director of the project will be filled by Peter Nijkamp, Emeritus Professor in Regional Economics and in Economic Geography, who will definitely ensure high quality and visibility of the action. The potential impact of the proposed project is consistent as it has high scientific and normative relevance, as well as a consistent explanatory power and it will respond to key priorities in several areas of strategic interests on the EU and Romania’s agendas. Main objective To provide a comprehensive understanding of the European regional development and convergence patterns, based on the resilience concept, and to design new approaches, methods and instruments for EU and national policies Specific objectives • to develop a new theoretical and empirical analysis framework of regional resilience from a multi-dimensional, multi-level and multi-actor approach; • to provide a comprehensive analysis of the regional resilience determinants in EU’s countries (the analysis will be conducted at NUTS 0 and NUTS 2 for all EU’s countries; for Romania the analysis will be performed at NUTS 3, and LAU 2 and will put in evidence the intra- regional differences; between urban and rural areas; between key actors); • to build an innovative model of regional growth and convergence, based on a resilience approach; • to propose a new normative framework for the assessment of the European regional policies and provide a set of policy recommendations for increasing the EU and national policies’ effectiveness; • to promote the research and scientific cooperation at national and European level in a new, innovative field and to enable knowledge transfer in the academia as well as among stakeholders in EU’s countries, focused on Romania; • to gather and promote lessons for Coronavirus pandemic crisis – multi-dimensions perspective. Activities • Update the current state of arts regarding resilience theories focusing on four main aspects of resilience • Elaborating and developing databases on the determinants of resilience for all the countries in the sample • Building a new methodological tool for assessing regional resilience • Performing a regional resilience assessment for the EU countries using long run time series for each dimension • The integrative perspective of resilience will be achieved by embedding resilience into the regional convergence model • The application of the model to the Romanian case, carrying out the case studies at NUTS3, and LAU2 levels in order to evaluate and explain the differences between regions, rural vs. urban areas, as well as the territorial resilience similarities/ dissimilarities • Developing a set of policy recommendations for EU and for Romania • Communication and dissemination of the project Project coordinator This project is coordinated by  professor Peter Nijkamp. From 2009-2015, he was Honorary University Professor at the same university. He has been president of the governing board of the Netherlands Research Council (NWO) (2002-2009). He is also former president of the European Regional Science Association and of the Regional Science Association International. He is fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and former vice- president of this organization. In 1996, Peter Nijkamp was awarded the most prestigious scientific prize in the Netherlands, the Spinoza award. Peter Nijkamp's main research interests cover plan evaluation, multicriteria analysis, regional and urban planning, transport systems analysis, mathematical modelling of spatial systems, migration, technological innovation, and environmental and resource management. In his long research career he has focused his research in particular on quantitative methods for policy analysis, as well as on behavioural analysis of economic agents. He has a broad expertise in the economics of public policy, services planning, infrastructure management, environmental management and sustainable development. PARTENERS Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania (UAIC) Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania (ASE) Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (UBB)

This projectd is supported by a grant of Ministery of Research and Innovation, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCCF-2016-0166, within PNCDI III