Romania’s investment rate to GDP in 2016, the lowest in the last 12 years

Romania recorded last year a ratio of investment to GDP of 22.7 percent, Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Union shows, ranking 7^th.

Although it exceeds countries like Germany, Spain or Poland, and even above the European average, the level recorded in 2016 is the lowest since 2004.

Across the EU Member States, Ireland recorded in 2016 the largest ratio of investment to GDP (29.3 percent), ahead of the Czech Republic (24.6 percent), Sweden (24.2 percent), Malta (23.4 percent), Belgium (23.0 percent), Austria (22.9 percent). At the opposite end of the scale, the lowest share of investment was registered by Greece (11.4 percent of GDP), followed by Portugal (14.8 percent), the United Kingdom (16.7 percent), Italy (17.0 percent) and Cyprus (17.2 percent).

In 2016, total investment levels in the European Union (EU) amounted to almost EUR 3,000 billion. 49 percent concerned construction, with machinery, equipment and weapons systems (30 percent) and intellectual property products (20 percent) following. The latter category has shown the largest increase in proportion to total capital investment.

Overall, total investment in the EU was equivalent to 19.7 percent of GDP in 2016, compared with 21 percent in 1996. This represented a decrease by 1.3 percentage points (pp).

Between 1996 and 2016, the ratio of investment to GDP decreased in a majority of the EU Member States with the largest declines being observed in Slovakia (20.2 percent in 2016 vs.33.5 percent in 1996, or -13.3 pp), the Czech Republic and Greece (both -9.4 pp) as well as Portugal (-9.0 pp).

Among the nine Member States which have seen the ratio rise between 1996 and 2016, the largest increases were recorded in Bulgaria (from 5.4 percent of GDP in 1996 to 19.1 percent in 2016, or +13.7 pp) and Ireland (+9.5 pp), followed by Sweden (+4.2 pp) and France (+2.1 pp).