EUR 5 bln European funds expected to step in Romania this year

The minister of European Funds Eugen Teodorovici assessed that Romania would get EUR 5 billion European funds this year, underlining the money has to be spent quickly by developing projects with high economic impact to downsize the gaps between our country and other EU member states.

While in Cluj-Napoca (northwest of Bucharest) attending the opening of the third Cluj Innovation Days event organized by the Cluj IT Cluster on Thursday, Teodorovici said it was important for Romania to learn from the past errors in the implementation of European project, while this would allow absorbing the available funds in the 2014 — 2020 budget at the fastest possible pace.

“In the current financial framework we are somewhere around 55 percent of absorption rate. I’d say this year we have all the arguments to estimate around 80 percent of use. This seems a very high figure, but it can happen. Indeed, we shouldn’t forget we started from a very low level, so that we can avoid such errors in the future,” Teodorovici argued.

According to him, Romania should have a 100 percent usage rate in the current multi-annual budget term, a goal to be reached in the first part of this period, namely over the first five years.

He also said that Romania has allocated EUR 1.5 billion of the European funds of the 2014-2020 budget term to research, innovation and communications, in several operational programmes.