Economic statistics

Romania has one of the best performances in Europe in terms of industrial output, but also rather poor FDI.

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Ştefan Stoica, 14.08.2014, 14:34

The European Statistics Office on Wednesday made public new data on the industrial output in the EU and Eurozone. While in the Eurozone the industrial output figures have stayed largely constant, for the European Union, as a whole, a slight increase has been reported, of 0.7% in June 2014, as compared to last year.

Hungary and Romania have seen the most substantial advance of the EU member states, with rates of 11.3% and 9.9% respectively. Next comes Slovakia, with a 7.5% increase in industry. The lowest rates were reported in Greece, Malta and Latvia, with falling rates of 6.9%, 3.8% and 2% respectively. In June 2014 compared to May, the industrial output dropped by 0.3% in the Eurozone and by 0.1% in the EU. Romania reported a 0.7% decline in its industrial output in June this year compared to the previous month, when it had seen a 2.7% increase.

While the news about industrial performances is good, not the same is true as far as direct foreign investments are concerned. In Romania, they totaled nearly 1.2 billion Euros in the first half of this year, which means 10.3% less than in the corresponding period of last year. The figures have been made public by the National Bank of Romania. Financial experts are rather pessimistic as regards a possible recovery of direct foreign investments, and blame the investors’ lack of interest on the domestic political tensions, deepened by the upcoming presidential election, on Europe’s frail economy and on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

On the other hand, analysts still have serious reserves regarding the likelihood of the Romanian economy to improve so much as to enable the Government to reduce social insurance contributions by 5%, as stipulated by a recent law. Everybody agrees that, while the measure is good, in principle, in that it reduces the tax burden on labour, its enforcement as of October 1st is rather ill-timed, because it may generate budget deficits that can only be offset through fresh taxes.