RURAL – URBAN INTERACTIONS. INFLUENCES ON THE RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROCESS IN THE NORTH –EAST REGION OF ROMANIA INTERACTIUNI RURAL – URBAN. INFLUENTE ASUPRA PROCESULUI DE DEZVOLTARE RURALA IN REGIUNEA DE NORD – EST A ROMANIEI Codrin PAVELIUC – OLARIU The “Ion Ionescu de la Brad University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, Iasi 6th Aleea M. Sadoveanu st., building. # C1, room # 14, 700489, Iasi, Romania, Phone: +40 740 931 943, E-mail : codrin.po@gmail.com Key words: interaction, rural, urban, development, planning Abstract This paper aims to present the interactions that occur between urban and rural, realizing a strict separation of these two areas, their populations and their activities here. This thing is being reflected in the division of policies on spatial and sectorial criteria, urban planners usually concentrating on the importance of urban centers as commerce and transportation nods in the regional policy giving little attention to agricultural or rural-led development. It is based on statistical data provided by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Rural Development and by the National Statistics Institute and on direct observation executed in the North – East region of Romania. The data has been processed into the following indicators: aging indicator, average number of rural inhabitants, active occupied population, infant mortality, the average index of poverty and others. This paper represents an overview of how the strategies of urban and rural are intertwined. It ends with some recommendations on how the planners and decision makers can take these issues into consideration. INTRODUCTION Rural development includes all actions aimed at improving the quality of life of people living in rural areas, to preserve natural and cultural landscape and ensure sustainable development of rural areas under specific conditions for those territories [1]. After 1989, the importance of research regarding rural development has grown due to the fact that for the modernization of a rural village it is a mandatory condition that of having an approved local development strategy for accessing development funds. In the North-East region of Romania, the importance of rural-urban influences must be researched when a rural development strategy is composed due to the importance of agricultural based revenues in all branches of the national economy [2]. The importance of the North-East region in the national economy is given by is share in the PIB (Gross Domestic Product) and in the number of occupied person. MATERIAL AND METHOD In order to characterize the influences that urban centre have over the development of rural communities , the following indicators were used : the average poverty index, aging index, average number of rural inhabitants, average income per inhabitant, investment opportunities, distance to the closest urban centre, average agricultural surface per rural inhabitant and others. The data, collected from Ministry of Agriculture, Forests and Rural Development and from the National Statistics Institute have been statistically processed and interpreted, establishing the type of