I read that Bucuresti has over one million cars now. This density of car is definitely higher than almost all Chinese cities and probably only Beijing can come close to this number (Beijing has about 3 million vehicles now, but the city is much larger than Bucuresti.). In China, everything is much cheaper than in US except cars and gasoline. I think that Romania needs more investment in infrastructure construction. Romania should build a few expressways so that the country can get integrated and mobilized for economic development. This is 30 page thread about expressway in China
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showth...232957&page=30
China's infrastructure development really shocks me. Every home that I visited has about the same level of interior decoration, furniture, and other facilities as the average home in America. I have heard that some Japanese are puzzled for how Chinese can afford the housing standard, considering that average Chinese monthly family income is only a couple of hundreds of dollars. I have been to Japan and seen Japanese houses. I am not surprised why Japanese are puzzled. I went to home improvement stores and furniture stores in my visit to China. The stores have the same size scale as well as variety and quality of goods as in American stores. Of course, in the less developed regions of China, people do not have this kind of housing standard. Here is how Tokyo looks like
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=446924
(The author of thread is a little bit negative about Toykio.)
On the other hand, I think that Romania can also achieve an economic miracle in next a few years if everything goes right. When I came to Romania 28 years ago, I was amazed by the large scale of concrete buildings in Romania, although people may call those buildings as “commy blocks” now. At that time, China did not have those “commy blocks” even in the largest Chinese cities. Ceausescu did a lot of bad things, but I think that Ceausescu also did some good jobs in the urbanization and industrialization of Romania before 1980, at least much better than Chinese leaders then. It would have been better if Ceausescu had been more open to the west, but the international environment might not allow him to do so. Anyway, that is all history now. To get high speed of development, high saving rate and investment rate is a key. In review of all countries with high economic development rate, almost all of them have high saving rate. So spending a lot of money to buy BMW might not be a good idea.
America used to have most of skyscrapers in the world. Right now, China has more skyscrapers and high rise buildings than America. This is because most skyscrapers in US are office buildings except in a few cities such as New York City. China built a lot of high-rise buildings for residential uses, so the population density in the city is much higher. Most middle class Americans live in two-story houses in suburb and drive cars to work. This is why oil is so important to US economy.
My birth city is called Fuzhou, which is not internationally known. It is ranked about 20th city in China. This is a thread about the city ranking in China. Every former is bragging his/her city. It seems that there is strong sense of competitions among Chinese cities. It would be interesting if you could read Chinese.
http://forum.xinhuanet.com/detail.jsp?id=40325699&pg=1
(post 253 is New York City, the rest are all Chinese cities.)
Competition is good because it motivates people. Are there any competitions for economic performance among cities and counties (judet) in Romania? Competitions can put pressure for the government officials to perform.