The Globalization Proces and How it Affects the Settlement Hierarchy. The

Seventeen years have passed since the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro took place. When the leaders will meet next time at the Johannesburg Summit, they will confront a world situation markedly different in many ways. Globalization, characterized by the liberalization of trade and capital markets and the rapid development of information and communication technologies, has dramatically changed the world's socio-economic landscape. This can be seen in Romania too. Even so, the 1990s was a time of increasing prosperity for countries, when the average annual rate of growth of the gross domestic product as a whole increased to 4.3 percent. The changes brought by globalization and technology push firms and governments to reorganize and refocus their own resources. With the same starting point, we will empirically try to show why the Romanian administrative system, concerned about the use of resources, so far constrains the achievement of a balance between resource efficiency and goal effectiveness. The paper points out the existence of a possible relationship between the development state of two Romanian cities, Oradea and Bucharest, and the globalisation process. That is because today, globalization, the first feature of this study, is one of the most influential forces which have brought changes in the development process.