In the context of de-collectivization process started in the early 1990s, and later on faced with the conditions of EU accession, the Romanian rural area has passed through a wide transformation process in the last 27 years. In this context, rural communities developed and evolved differently, according to their capacity to seize opportunities like: being close to urban areas, direct access to European and national transport routes, access to non-reimbursable funding, existing human capital etc. This study aims to evaluate the evolution of Romanian North-West Region communes in the 2002-2011 period, using several determinant development factors (five independent variables). In this context we used the IDUL – a local development index created by the Romanian sociologist Dumitru Sandu.