Financial Press Review, 1 March

The Curierul Naţional headlined quoting the prime minister: ‘Boc: I’m not scared of the censure motion announced for the Labour Code.’ ‘According to the Executive, the new Labour Code will create thousands of jobs - an opinion at odds with the trade unions and political opposition’, the Ziarul Financiar wrote.

The Bursa also recorded the opinion of the Executive Director of the Applied Economics Group, Liviu Voinea, who argued that ‘labour market flexibility, as it was proposed by amending the Labour Code, will put out jobs on the black market, but it will lead to the disappearance of many permanent job contracts, which will be replaced with fixed-term contracts, disadvantaging the young employees and women and, and also probably to lower revenues.’

The Curierul Naţional noted that ‘the state has stepped up controls to detect the companies that do not declare their vacancies. The purpose of this measure is explained in the headline: ‘State controls firms to limit “undeclared work”.’

Under the headline ‘Analysts predict higher interest rates and strengthening the leu because of the inflation’s threat’, the Ziarul Financiar wrote: ‘Faced with the perspective of a new inflation target miss, the National Bank of Romania began to fight the rises by indirectly intervening in the foreign exchange market to support the strengthening of the leu against the euro’ and could temper the pressure on the prices of imported goods. ‘In January, the paper pointed out, our country registered the highest annual rate of inflation in the European Union, which was 7 percent. The annual average inflation at Community level in January was 2.7 percent.’

In the weekly Economist, Mircea Coşea noted that ‘the early 2011 in Europe is characterised by an apparent attempt to rethink the crisis and the type of action against it, avoiding the trap of restricting only to the analysis of the financial phenomena.’ In order to overcome the crisis it should be understood that the industry is not a purpose itself or just an attribute of the emerging countries, but an indispensable mean of creating jobs, the response to social issues and foreign trade balance. The article entitled ‘Industrial policy anti-crisis.’ The same weekly published an interview with the president of the National Institute of Statistics, Vergil Voineagu. He stated: ‘Personally, I am not for the opinions of being out of the crisis when the international context wants to.’

The Ziarul Financiar wrote also about our country’s reaction to the crisis in an article enheadlined ‘Romania - the largest decrease in the number of overnights in the EU tourism structures. At Community level, the number overnights increased by 2.8 percent last year, while in our country it dropped by 8.7 percent, according to the Eurostat data. The article informs us that in 2010 Romania was the European country with the lowest share of the total overnights of the foreign tourists ‘more precisely 18 percent versus 70 percent in Bulgaria.

Tourism’s situation is also discussed in an article published by the Curierul Naţional under the headline ‘Cases of travel agencies stamps have flourished in the years of crisis.’ ‘The ghost firms have worked their way to the market and brought million euros damages to both individuals and agencies’, the newspaper revealed. The customs corruption scandal continues to preoccupy almost all economic publications.

‘Prime minister demands investigation from NAFA, Blejnar not resigning’, is the headline of an article in the Ziarul Financiar, from which we learn that: ‘As he has been in the center of customs corruption scandal for a few days now, the head of the IRS is forced to deny any involvement, but the pressures are growing stronger, while in the press there keep appearing allegations from some former and current workers in the system, but also from the political opposition, who argued that he was a link (if not ‘the queen’) in this chain of culpability. If the prosecutor confirms one suspicion, then Blejnar will lose his job, the prime minister stated yesterday, saying that, so far, the NAFA investigation is an administrative one.’


Translated by: Iulia Florescu
MA Student, MTTLC, Bucharest University