Romania in 2050

CRISTINA CHIRIAC (translated by Cosmin Ghidoveanu)
Ziarul BURSA #English Section / 25 noiembrie 2015

Romania in 2050

The BURSA press group, in association with the National Association of Entrepreneurs (ANAA) is organizing today, the second edition of the conference "Strategies for the development of SMEs", with the topic "The implications of the Fiscal Code on SMEs".

Mrs. Cristina Chiriac, the president of the National Association of Entrepreneurs, will participate in the conference as moderator as well as representative of the ANAA. On that occasion, she sent a message to the representatives of the small and medium companies that are part of the target audience of the BURSA newspaper.

Romania has two categories of vulnerable people: the young and the elderly. For years, the long term solutions provided by specialists have been ignored, opting instead for short-term fixed for the vulnerabilities of the system. Can we still dream of a peaceful old age, in which the small joys of life would be present in our life? Does the Romanian state offer sufficient aid to those who have faithfully contributed monthly to the state budget or do we need to worry about finding solutions to ensure for us a decent old age?

Even though 2050 seems rather distant and many of you may argue that significant progress has been made concerning the fiscal doctrine, the deadline is not enough to stop the concerns of those who actively contribute today to the creation of the social security budget, with the most important aspect being perhaps the population's occupancy rate.

Up until this year, in Romania there has been an imbalance between the number of employees and the number of retirees, with the balance clearly showing a social and economic discrepancy.

25 years of capitalism have meant 25 years of failed privatizations, one program after another, the disappearance of industrial sectors in some places, the shutdown of many companies and approximately 2,000,000 jobs lost.

This is the result of the economic policies carried out and persistently pursued by the government for years on end, economic policies that have not succeeded in restructuring, retraining and reinvesting in people. And nowadays, the results of those factors are visible, as many of those people are forced to withdraw from the workforce, even though they were physically apt.

I would start a reminiscing exercise and the first example that comes to my mind are the people who were employed in the army, and then I would continue with those who have worked in the mining sector and the examples could continue with research or other sectors.

The state plays an extraordinarily important role in the development of the business sector. Its economic role should not be achieved only on a macroeconomic level, but on a microeconomic level as well. Only when all of the four major functions of the state will interact with each other, only then will we have the ability to discuss a correct action of the fiscal policy which is specific to the state's stability-creating role, for example.

The absolute priority of any government should be the creation of jobs, starting from the basic need of any Romanian citizen and followed by policies to stimulate the birthrate in order to halt the much too obvious decline.

The youth, those who are the future workforce, will be increasingly fewer in numbers, and the ones who are specialized, and have higher education and are willing to work, will decide to migrate, so they can lead a better life. Romanians' migration rate will increase, creating a difficult and totally unfavorable context for Romania from every point of view: social, economic, political.

Moving to concrete numbers, I can say that the unemployment rate, in the Eurozone, was 10.8% in September 2015, down from August 2015, when it was 10.9% and compared to last year's similar period (September 2014) when the unemployment rate was 11.5%. This shows a careful concern and an active involvement in the job creation policy at the level of the European Union, with an emphasis on the stimulation of the small and medium enterprises sector.

What solutions did Romania find to stimulate this sector?

This is a question that we will be answering in the conference "Strategies for the development of SMEs", which has as its main topic "The implications of the new Fiscal Code for SMEs".

Definitely, being an entrepreneur in today's Romania is already an act that takes guts, when being an employee in the public sector grants you a flurry of wage hikes, being a retiree nowadays is a luxury that not many can afford and being young in today's Romania is a path that does not offer many options.

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