THE CURRENT STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE – BASED ECONOMY IN ROMANIA

Today, knowledge is seen as the driving force of growth, productivity, and even globalization, leading to a growing interest towards information, technology and learning, and their role in the economy growth.

The role of knowledge as the pillar of the new society and economy is found far beyond the transmission of knowledge process through computer networks and communications, fitting to its various aspects of society and economy, from learning processes to business planning. However, new technologies are enabling the increase of knowledge transfer rate at a lower cost and with much efficiency.Defining the knowledge economy is a difficult goal given the wide variety of successful implementations of the concept and countries that have made significant progress in implementing it, like: USA, UK, France, Germany, Finland, Austria, Singapore and South Korea.Romania's European and global context requires urgent need to increase the competitiveness of the economy. It is well known that competitive advantage of an economy is no longer based in today's products or services, the presence of natural resources, geographical or historical features. Today's competitive advantage is created through innovation, highly skilled workforce and extensive use of knowledge, in other words through a knowledge-based economy (Knowledge Economy).

The role of this paper is to identify the stage of knowledge and implementation of knowledge-based economy in Romania, and which are the knowledge-based economy challenges in terms of analyzing the structure of Romanian research system and the process of innovation.