Financial Press Review, December 15

The daily Ziarul Financiar opens with a commentary on the President"s press conference from last night.

"President Traian Băsescu was undecided as to when we will overcome recession: he discussed the first quarter, the first half and the second half of 2011," the daily reads.

In the above mentioned article we read that "this time last year both President Traian Băsescu and Prime Minister Boc were telling the same about this year, but, in the end, the Government had to resort to extreme measures – salary cuts and VAT raise – because the revenue didn"t match the prognosis."

"Greece and Romania are the only EU member states to record annual falls in GDP in the third quarter of this year," financial dailies all point out Vergil's Voineagu words, president of the National Institute of Statistics.

Under the headline "Significant list of balance sheets for 2011," the Ziarul Financiar prints Adrian's Vasilescu opinion that "we say goodbye to 2010 with a negative balance sheet. We have more failures than successes for the second year in a row."

It was the measures meant to balance out the budget, painful, but absolutely necessary, that made it possible to overcome the recession.

And now, at the end of the year, we find ourselves at a crossroads.

We have to choose: we either step into 2011, clear minded and determined to step up restructuring from the state budget to foreign debt and from quality economic growth to the labor market, or we will need to accept an extreme fall in the standard of living, because of public spending cuts and the country"s weakening workforce.

"The major issue is delaying restructuring. Those measures that will forever sever Romania's ties with its past," Adrian Vasilescu concludes, making a case for shutting down as many waste and loss holes as possible.

The Curierul Naţional points out that, according to an evaluation by the National Council of Small and Medium Sized Private Enterprises in Romania (CNIPMMR), "the business environment continues to be hostile to business development."

In this context, Council Chairman Ovidiu Nicolescu reiterated a series of measures that should be adopted to support the Small and Medium Sized Private Enterprises sector in Romania.

Among them, the payment of arrears is considered a priority at this moment.

"If the state pays its arrears, which currently exceed 1.5 billion euros in cash, within two months the money will go into the state budget in the form of fees and taxes and things would improve."

"This applies for effective absorption of structural funds also. Also, of the money spent for these funds will go back to the government in the form of taxes, contributions and other payroll taxes within two months. It is extremely important to take this problems seriously if we want to grow”, the president of the CNIPMMR underlined, quoted by the Curierul Naţional.

"Regarding the flat tax, the results of a study conducted by the Council show that almost 92 percent of the Small and Medium Sized Private Enterprises want to reduce it, most of them to 10 percent, the newspaper writes, emphasizing that most states in the area adopted a similar measure.

Today's financial press covers the opinion of Francois Rantrua, the Country Director of the World Bank in Romania, who declared for the Bloomberg yesterday that "there are signs that Romania is getting out of the crisis".

Under the headline "Vehicle taxes increased the number of polluting cars", the Curierul Naţional concludes that "last month, the number of used car registrations reached the highest value recorded this year of 26.887 units, with an increase of 80 percent compared to November 2009."(...)

Although almost all value vouchers have been distributed (almost 182.000 old cars have been scrapped), by the end of this month only 53.000 new vehicles have been bought, compared to 63.333, the number advocated by governors.

This year in particular, Romanians took their cars to the Recycling Company Remat, but not in order to get a new car by using the value voucher and paying a cash difference, but actually to sell the voucher in order to buy a used car that is slightly better than the sold jalopy.

Translated by Gabriela Lungu and Manuela Stancu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University