Peri-urban Tides and Archipelagos: Labour Flows and Aggregate Demand in Romania’s Foreign Investment-driven Spatial Economy

This paper examines how Romania's foreign investment-driven growth model reshaped population patterns through spatial concentration and labour mobilisation in peri-urban areas. Building on the distinctive concepts of peri-urban tides and peri-urban archipelagos, we analyse how foreign-owned manufacturing and business services reconfigure labour flows and residential expansion across urban, peri-urban, and rural municipalities. Using SARAR-SUR spatial econometric models and case studies from the Cluj Metropolitan Area, we show that multinational firms rely on spatial strategies that externalise reproduction costs and segment labour by sector and skill. Manufacturing firms draw mobile, low-cost labour from rural areas through employer-subsidised commuting, while business services spur peri-urban residential growth among subcontracted white-collar workers. Domestic capital and the public sector play more fragmented roles, with public employment lagging behind demographic change in rapidly growing peri-urban zones. Contrary to narratives of rural depopulation, the findings reveal a spatial fix that retains rural populations while fuelling peri-urban accumulation. This municipal-level analysis contributes to the subnational turn in growth regime theory by highlighting how sectoral specialisation, capital origin, and institutional inertia produce uneven demographic outcomes. The concepts introduced offer analytical tools to interpret how global value chains embed themselves in the spatial hierarchies of semi-peripheral urbanisation.