Isărescu: "For us, financial education is a complementary element to regulatory and supervisory policies"

For the central bank, financial education is a complementary element to regulatory, supervisory and even financial stability policies, stated yesterday the governor of the BNR, Mugur Isărescu, on the occasion of an event hosted by the national bank.

The governor declared: "The research carried out on a national level, based on well-established methodologies but also on samples that ensure appropriate representativeness, does not look good at all. The majority of adult citizens in Romania have insufficient knowledge in the financial field. However, it is known that, for the most efficient functioning of the economic mechanisms, every active person should have minimal economic-financial information, which would allow him to manage his money and associated risks responsibly. To know the functioning of the economy in general and the national economy, the market economy in particular".

Mugur Isărescu added: "Understanding important concepts for every active citizen, such as the inflation mechanism or the process of interest formation, represents an intrinsic target of financial education from our point of view. Not only here, financial education becomes for the central bank a complementary element of regulatory, supervisory and even financial stability policies. Therefore, we are directly interested in increasing the level of knowledge among the adult public, but not only, as well as using any tool that can develop economically healthy attitudes and behaviors among the population and especially among the young generation".

According to the governor, the NBR has been dealing with financial education since 1991, with the promulgation of the first banking laws, long before it was a topic of interest to both the authorities and the public. "Whether they are debates, symposia, conferences, colloquiums on various topics, volumes on economic topics and more, appearing in the collection of the National Bank of Romania, whether the specialists of the central bank have public appearances or sign author articles, they all have not only a informative role but also, explicitly, an educational role. In practice, the banking laws forced us to do so," Isărescu said.