Financial Press Review, 29 June

The fall in public investment, the fight against inflation and unblocking private credits are today’s main topics.

The Ziarul Financiar opens with the headline ‘Boc Administration Cuts Public Spending and Stifles the Economy’.

Public investment has been falling for two and a half years.

Investment has been decreasing, despite the fact that in the first five months of this year cash inflow to the budget has improved, the daily reads.

‘On paper, the Boc administration has many projects, but state investment is, in fact, down’.
It was not leverage in the anti-crisis program, despite promises.
‘We need to have a strategy on stringent investment. Then we need to distribute the money several times a year. Otherwise, we will keep complaining that we do not have any money’, the

Ziarul Financiar quotes Ionuţ Dumitru, Fiscal Council President.
Moreover, ‘there are irregularities in many of the projects. The EU is now investigating how important amounts of money – 800 Euro – were spent’, the same article quotes financial analyst Aurelian Dochia.

The Ziarul Financiar discusses the statement that John Lipsky, Interim General Manager of the IMF, made on Monday that ‘the NBR might need to make faster changes to its monetary policy’ in order to reduce inflation.

The Ziarul Financiar quotes IMF’s representative in Romania under the headline ‘What Jeffrey Franks Says’: Together with the Romanian authorities, we will look into the economic implications of the administrative-territorial reorganization has, before making a decision, the IMF representative claims.

‘As for state companies, the IMF thinks Romania needs to make extra efforts to implement stronger structural reforms in this sector’, the article reads on.

On the same topic, below the headline ‘State-owned Companies: the End of Pampering’, Adrian Vasilescu, NBR Governor’s counselor, writes in the Ziarul Financiar that ‘this summer, due to European Commission and IMF pressure, a change in the state’s policy concerning these companies is starting to take shape: from excessive financial romanticism to pragmatism’.

‘After barely making ends meet for two decades, nothing good has come of it – neither efficiency, nor development or wealth – it is clear now that a fundamental change, which would bring in more money, is in order’.

‘We have sacrificed economic efficiency, while populist motivations primed in front of factors that bring wealth worldwide: productivity, efficiency, competition ’.

As a consequence, in the European statistics we have long been holding the red flash light, Adrian Vasilescu says and concludes: ‘State-owned companies will only be revived with a different economic equation, liked to the work-market. That is the only way to win the game’.

The Curierul Naţional opens with the headline ‘Dentists Set Prices By Ear’.

‘It is irrelevant for dentists how much a certain procedure costs’, the daily quotes Vlad Naicu from the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy from Bucharest.

‘Half of them set prices according to competition and a quarter of them do it according to the patient’.

Translated by: Gabriela Lungu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University