Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.
Minister of Investments and European Projects, Cristian Ghinea, said in a press statement after the government sitting on Thursday that the Executive had agreed with the European Commission the reforms that Romania will make based on the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
Minister Ghinea underlined that “without substantial reforms this plan won’t pass”. Among the reforms discussed with the Executive in Brussels there are a reform of the pensions, including cutting special pensions, capping the state salary envelope, an audit across all state companies and the establishment of a special department within the General Secretariat of the Government that would handle the reform of the state companies, including shutting down those that are not profitable.
At the same time, a reform in the Transport sector is envisaged, a new way of taxing the traffic and an environment tax to discourage the registration of old cars.
The minister said that the EC had suggested Romania to not file the loan requests now, considering that EUR 13 billion funds from the Resilience Plan are as grants and EUR 16 billion as loans, and Romania is already under excessive deficit procedure.
“There are two countries that will use all loans from the Recovery and Resilience Plan: Romania and Italy. The misfortune is that we are the only EU country under excessive budget deficit procedure. That will hinder us from luring the loans, as they will hang in the budget deficit balance. The EC has recommended is to not file now the requests for loans. We have been very clear that we’ll file request for all those EUR 29.2 billion”, minister Ghinea said.
The Recovery and Resilience Plan envisages the following funds for Romania:
- around EUR 2.2 bln for the business environment
- EUR 3.7 bln for education (expectations: 10,000 labs, 2,000 green buses, over 80,000 classrooms equipment with furniture, 50 new built school units)
- EUR 2.5 bln for healthcare (construction and /or equipment of 200 community centres, 3,000 new family doctor offices, 100 family planning offices)
- forestation programmes, countering illegal logging, biodoversity – EUR 1.4 bln
- transport – EUR 8.5 bln
- fund for rehabilitation wave – EUR 2.2 bln.
- Advertisement -