the quality of human resources in romania amid the development of the knowledge era

Following the transformations through which national economies have been going through recently, we note that there has been a change in the type of economic development. Basically, the shift is made from the traditional economy to the "new economy" that focuses on long-term sustainable economic development. This economy pursues human and technological development. In this context, the contribution of the human capital to economic development should be analysed in terms of its qualitative side. Considering that Europe is heading towards a new type of economic development based on the quality of the human factor, the main factors (education, research - development, health, but also labour-related incentives) determining a certain level of quality of the human capital should be subject to analysis. In order to identify and understand the current state of affairs, the trends in the evolution of Romanian economy, in the context of European development strategies, a broad approach perspective is needed, to combine the historical approach with the economic and sociological ones. For Romania, this process is all the more important and difficult to carry out the longer the period of time (the communist period) was, during which the human resource was seen as a production potential, not as a beneficiary of the economic activities. Practically, man lived to work, and not the other way around. Romania had a lot to catch up with, important structural changes needed to be made in order to achieve a sustainable economic development. Given all this, the paper brings forward all the issues related to the training of the human capital during communist times, in order to understand the difficulties in the approach of the Romanian economy seeking to transform itself as required by the European Union Strategy.Sustainable economic growth cannot be achieved without certain skills and without certain social and professional standards. This paper aims to produce a qualitative, as well as a quantitative analysis, based on the comparison between the dynamics of indicators representative for the situation of important influence factors of the efficiency and current and potential quality of the human capital in Romania. The period considered for our study refers to the period following Romania's accession to the EU.