Budget adjustment in Romania
The government has approved a first budget adjustment this year in Romania, as the country is facing the largest budget deficit in the EU
Corina Cristea, 02.10.2025, 13:50
With a higher deficit target, 8.4% of GDP as renegotiated with the European Commission, the Romanian government Wednesday passed the first budget adjustment this year.
About EUR 4.8 billion of the extra money covers essential expenses with pensions, salaries and social assistance, while another EUR 2.4 billion of the newly allocated funds will be used to pay interest on previous government loans. The remaining amounts will go towards investments.
The budget adjustment passed by the Romanian government brings the state budget into a realistic area, the finance minister Alexandru Nazare believes, in the sense that an analysis was made of all the authorising institutions in terms of expenditure and revenues, so that these expenses and revenues may be planned as realistically as possible.
A reasonable “compromise” has been reached, even if most ministers were not happy, the finance minister also said, and explained that the goal was to adjust the amounts in the loan component of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNNR) for the ministries that no longer had money for investments.
Alexandru Nazare: “The transport ministry, the economy ministry, the ministry of the environment and the development ministry, all these four ministries no longer had money available under the PNRR loan component. With this adjustment, we have solved all these problems, we have around RON 5 billion.”
Why is this important? Because we need to start thinking about stepping up the spending of the PNRR funds, says the finance minister, and this money is important for achieving the targets of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. Romania is completing the talks regarding the last memoranda related to this plan and is heading straight towards the approval of the Plan’s renegotiation. The finance minister also emphasised that, by passing the budget adjustment before the Council of Finance Ministers due on October 10 and by adopting and explaining the new deficit target and all the measures related to this adjustment, a very good signal will be sent, not only to the European Commission, but also to the markets, a signal “that we keep our commitments, that we do what we say and that we change our attitude regarding the evaluation of budgets.”
Minister Nazare also announced that talks will begin in November on the 2026 state budget, on different coordinates, in which both investments and all essential expenses will be included, so that next year in the budget adjustment we will not end up having to operate expenditure increases as significant as the current one. (AMP)
