Gabriella Borgovan

The Entrepreneurial Cities in Post-socialist Countries: How Do Capital Cities Deal with the Global Market Competition? Bucharest vs. Budapest Gabriella Borgovan

In order to create more opportunities, cities must be able to attract more investment, business, residents and visitors. In order to improve the country/city image, governments have lately been engaged in conventional marketing techniques used otherwise by private companies. A well designed program to attract foreign investment contains complementary elements: promotion, incentives, and policies designed to improve the investment climate. Actions like subsidizing investors, promotion of the city, branding, offering financial incentives to existing companies and to investors are only few of the strategies that are considered to be entrepreneurial. What entrepreneurial cities are, if the two analyzed cities can be considered entrepreneurial, what policies they adopted since the fall of the communist regimes and how these policies affected the local development of the respective cities are only few of the issues that will be addressed in this paper.