A government plan for Romania’s economic recovery

The government of Romania has presented a ten-year ambitious plan for economic recovery after the pandemic. The plan has a budget of 100 billion euros

Eugen Coroianu, 02.07.2020, 14:00

Romania’s
government and president on Wednesday launched an ambitious economic recovery
plan under the name ‘Rebuilding Romania’. The plan, which unfolds on a period
of 10 years and has a budget of 100 billion euros, is aimed at raising the
standard of living of every citizen through massive investment and changing the
country’s model of development.

The
plan is focusing on the country’s transport and energy infrastructure, its
healthcare, investment in education, local development, agriculture,
environment and sporting activities. The objective promoted by the Executive is
to achieve convergence with the European economies so that the GDP at
purchasing power per capita may reach 87% of the EU average in 2025. According
to the initiators, the major difference would be the investment-based economic
growth, which is supposed to replace the previous model based on consumption.
Here is Prime Minister Ludovic Orban with more on the plan.

Ludovic Orban: We
want to invest in modernizing the transport infrastructure to raise the
competitiveness of companies, in order to increase Romania’s investment
attraction, which fosters the creation of fresh jobs, development and
eventually revenues of the state budget. Romania is a rich country with
resources and capitalizing on these resources must be done smartly through
earmarking money to those activities and domains, which could make the most of
all the resources Romania has

Under
the aforementioned plan, investment in infrastructure accounts for 60% out of
the total 100 billion euros. The government has presented big infrastructure
projects including 3000 kilometers of highway and the same number of railway by
2030. The document includes rapid measures to provide assistance to big and
small companies with 3 billion Euros worth of grants.

The
government pledges to shell out money from the state budget to provide
assistance to companies, which resorted to technical unemployment, part-time
and house working. Investment in hospitals and schools is also ambitious as the
plan provides for the construction of three regional emergency hospitals,
thousands of schools as well as kindergartens built or modernized. Here is the
country’s president Klaus Iohannis.

Klaus Iohannis: The Romanians deserve to have a highway
network at European levels, a strong and reliable energy system at national and
regional level, competitive industries and services. And we can have all these
only by stepping up major investment projects in an effective, professional and
transparent manner. However, any ambitious investment plan requires good
funding and for this reason, European funds must become an essential pillar of
our development.

According
to the Social-Democratic opposition, the government’s plan is only meant to
attract votes in the upcoming election though, being ungrounded and based on EU
funds without saying anything about how these funds are going to be attracted.

(translated
by bill)