Near Romania’s borders, companies are more often run by people born in the country next door

The country next door#

Romania’s trade register (ONRC, the National Trade Register Office) records, for every company administrator, the country they were born in. Of 1,667,359 companies where that field is filled, 148,280 (8.9%) have at least one administrator born outside Romania. Behind them are 134,141 people.

For each county, the number of administrators born in a given country, per company, was compared with the same ratio for Romania as a whole. In Harghita, administrators born in Hungary are 13.7 times as common per company as nationally (495 people). In Mehedinți, those born in Serbia are 9.1 times as common; in Iași, those born in Moldova, 5.4 times (4,700 people).

In 13 of the 19 counties on a land border, the country furthest above the national rate is one of the neighbours that county touches. In the other 23 counties, Bucharest and Ilfov (the county around it) included, a neighbouring country comes first in only five: Hungary in Harghita, Covasna, Mureș and Sălaj, where many people speak Hungarian (Harghita and Covasna are in the Székely Land, where most people speak Hungarian), and Moldova in Neamț, where no country is above the national rate.

The six border counties where the rule fails are on the Danube, on the coast and in Arad. In Arad, those born in Serbia come first (4.3 times), and Serbia does not border Arad. In Dolj the first are those born in Jordan, in Olt in Spain, in Călărași in Lebanon, in Constanța in Egypt, in Tulcea in Italy.

The order says less than it seems: in Timiș, the largest group of administrators born abroad were born in Italy (3,073 people), but relative to the national rate, those born in Serbia are more common (8.0 times, 472 people). That is why each county’s card lists every country with at least 30 people, with the count.

The checks#

If the neighbours are shuffled at random among the 19 border counties (Hungary given to Suceava, say), the 13 matches never come back in 200,000 shuffles. This indicates that the pattern is specific to each county’s own neighbour, not to being on a border in general. If every county had the national mix of birth countries and the differences were chance alone, an average of 0.7 counties would match, and none of 5,000 draws matched more than five.

Trade and haulage firms could explain why companies registered near the border more often have administrators born abroad. All companies authorised for wholesale, road transport or warehousing were removed (39% of the companies). On the rest, the rule holds in 12 of 19 counties.

Bessarabia (today mostly the Republic of Moldova), northern Bukovina (today in Ukraine) and Southern Dobruja (today in Bulgaria) were Romanian until 1940, and Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were under Romanian administration again from 1941 to 1944. Someone born there in those years, in Chișinău for example, may be listed today as born in Moldova. Keeping only people born in 1945 or later, the rule still holds in 13 of 19 counties. Of the 23,717 administrators born in Moldova whose birth year is known, only 111 were born before 1945.

How stable the numbers are: the people were split at random into two halves and county multipliers were computed for each half. The halves differ by 12% at the median (477 county–country pairs with at least 15 people in each half). The country that comes first in one half is among the top three of the other in 36 of 42 counties.

One test failed: distance to the border, on its own, does not predict the share commune by commune. A model fitted on half the counties and checked on the other half cuts the error by at least a fifth only for Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, not for Moldova or Ukraine.

Towns and communes#

On the map, the circles are towns and communes (Romania’s rural municipalities) with at least 400 companies whose administrators’ birth country is known. A circle appears only where at least 30 people were born in the chosen country.

In Tomești, a commune next to Iași, 14.7% of companies have an administrator born in Moldova (212 people), the highest share in Romania. In Valea lui Mihai, in Bihor, 11.1% have one born in Hungary; in Salonta, 9.0%. In Sighetu Marmației, on the Tisza, 3.8% have one born in Ukraine (128 people).

Among the places shown, Timișoara has the highest share of companies with an administrator born in Serbia (0.8%), and the commune of Afumați, next to Bucharest, the highest with one born in Bulgaria (3.4%). Afumați tops other lists too: 11.5% of its companies have an administrator born in Turkey and 7.8% one born in China.

New companies, year by year#

Among companies with a natural-person administrator, the birth country is filled for almost all registered since 2015, for 79% of those from 2010–2014 and for at most 37% of older ones. That is why the chart starts in 2010.

Among new companies in 2021, 0.21% had an administrator born in Ukraine. In 2022, the year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the share doubled (0.49%), and by 2026 it reached 1.03%. For Moldova, the share rose from 1.05% in 2010 to 2.24% in 2023. For Hungary it fell, from 0.56% to 0.21%.

The largest changes are not the neighbours. New companies with an administrator born in Italy were 3.12% in 2013 and 0.92% in 2026. Those with one born in China were 0.22% in 2022 and 1.57% in 2026, a share more than five times as high.

Away from the border#

In Sibiu, administrators born in Germany are 5.5 times as common as the national average (682 people); Sibiu was a centre of the Transylvanian Saxons, many of whom moved to Germany. In Mediaș, 3.1% of companies have one. In Brașov, those born in Israel come first (2.7 times, 343 people).

In Bistrița-Năsăud, those born in Spain come first (2.6 times, 94 people), and the median registration year of their companies is 2022. The register does not say whether they are Spaniards or children of Romanians who went to work in Spain and came back; nothing in these data tells the two apart.

In the west, Timiș and Arad have three times the national rate of administrators born in Italy (3,073 and 1,238 people). In Ilfov, the county around Bucharest, those born in China are 4.6 times as common (1,723 people).

Bucharest has the highest share of companies with an administrator born abroad (17.3%), Gorj the lowest (1.8%). Bucharest’s share may be raised by companies that keep their legal seat there but work elsewhere.

What the register records, and what it does not#

The register records where a person was born, not their citizenship and not where the company’s money comes from. Someone born in Hungary may be a Romanian citizen, a Hungarian one, or both. In October 2026, 24,588 companies had an administrator born in Moldova; at the end of 2025, ONRC counted 8,163 companies with Moldovan capital. The two numbers measure different things: where a person was born, and which country the capital comes from.

ONRC’s foreign-capital statistics count 263,118 companies with foreign participation at the end of 2025. By number of companies, Italy is first, with 54,425. By subscribed capital, counted in lei, the Netherlands is first, with 19.9% of foreign capital from only 6,286 companies. Cyprus has 6,659 companies with Cypriot capital, but in the October 2026 register only 960 companies have at least one administrator born in Cyprus. The country recorded for the capital and an administrator’s country of birth measure different things.

The county is that of the company’s registered seat, not of the administrator’s home. The register has no filled-in column for the country a person lives in, so it cannot say how many of them cross the border every day.